Less transgressive than its hero
Tom of Finland 18 cert, 114 min
Dir Dome Karukoski Starring
Pekka Strang, Jessica Grabowsky, Lauri Tilkanen, Werner Daehn, Seumas F Sargent
‘These are your men,” a Los Angeleno tells visitor Touko Laaksonen – aka the gay erotic artist Tom of Finland – while waving towards a swimming pool surrounded by beefy young guys in leather jackets.
What he means is they’re admirers of his work. It’s the early Sixties, samesex relationships are still illegal – and Laaksonen’s drawings of carefree homosexual dalliances are sources of satisfaction and solace.
But it’s clear they’re Tom’s men in another sense too: they actually look like the characters in his work come to grinning, bulging life. This Finnish film, directed by Dome Karukoski and starring Pekka Strang, is a generally tidy, wellacted and otherwise code-compliant biopic, but it’s also the story of how one man’s artistic and sexual proclivities came to shape the tastes of an entire culture. Early on, Laaksonen jokingly describes a certain part of his anatomy as “my boss”: its reaction ultimately determines whether or not his artworks pass muster. Considering how much of a chord they went on to strike internationally, it must have been uncannily tuned to the times.
Both Tom and his art are unambiguously presented as products of those times: Aleksi Bardy’s script links his cartoon figures’ uniforms and hypermasculine physiques to the Soviet and Nazi soldiers Laaksonen fought in the Second World War, and the Finnish police, who prowled gay spots in the uneasy postwar years. As he sketches in his room, the figures of oppression are transformed from the stuff of nightmares to playful dreamboys – a look that went on to inspire artists from Robert Mapplethorpe to Freddie Mercury, not to mention the creative directors of countless underwear campaigns. Basically, sexual tension is his strong suit – a talent that’s put to good use in his day-job at a Helsinki advertising agency, when he coaxes real chemistry from two (straight) colleagues posing for a reference photograph, while the lens of his camera lewdly extends in his lap.
The film is very good at capturing the milieus across which Tom’s life plays out, from the conservative Helsinki surface to its clandestine gay subculture, which feels like the stuff of film noir. And later on, there is the fun, almost hallucinatory transition to sun-soaked California, when Tom meets Doug (Seumas F Sargent), an early American supporter, and makes a formal move into publishing and exhibiting his work.
Less convincing are the relationships: Laaksonen ends up living in an achingly awkward ménage a trois with his sister (Jessica Grabowsky) and a handsome gay lodger (Lauri Tilkanen) who catches both siblings’ eyes, but the prongs of this particular dilemma never build up much of an emotional charge. In tandem with the usual biopic drawbacks, from an unwieldy timeline to distracting ageing make-up, this makes Tom of Finland an interesting film rather than an engrossing one, and it’s hard not to wish it was a little more energised by its subject’s enduringly transgressive spirit. RC