The story of Tove Jansson’s artistic struggles and daring bisexual affairs in 1940s Finland is energised by a shining central performance from Alma Pöysti
A quietly blazing and passionate performance by Alma Pöysti brings the bisexual Finnish artist and Moomins creator Tove Jansson to life in this emotional but low-key drama directed by Zaida Bergroth. Covering a decade or so of Jansson’s life from the mid 1940s, it tells of her first madly-in-love relationship with a woman and the story of how her doodles on scraps of paper became a worldwide sensation. Where biopics often end up with a cardboard-tasting blandness, the focus on Jansson’s interior world gives this film moments that really come to life.
It begins with Jansson as a penniless artist in her 20s, with steady blue eyes and bluntly cropped short blond hair. Not for the first time she is swallowing the disappointment of being passed over for a government grant to support her painting – mostly traditional still lifes and portraits. She jokes to
Friends that she is living in the bleak shadow of her famous sculptor father Viktor Jansson (Robert Enckell). At home their family life is bohemian, but it’s clear that Viktor is an authority-wielding paterfamilias. “That’s not art,” he says dismissively of Jansson’s whimsical sketches of hippo-like trolls. She moves out and rents a freezing, unheated studio.