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Award-winning filmmaker Dome Karukoski brings to screen the life and work of artist Touko Valio Laaksonen (aka Tom of Finland), one of the most influential and celebrated figures of twentieth century gay culture.
Karukoski's scenes often have a smoky, sweaty reek that would have amused the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder, a titan of tang himself... The tensile central performance by Pekka Strang is adroit at capturing the complicated man.
Why does Tom of Finland play like an over-cited term paper? The film is jammed with incident and detail but there's little flow to the storytelling ...
Touko Laaksonen sketched out an enduring legacy with his homoerotic images of hyper-masculine men. So, why then is Dome Karukoski's depiction of Laaksonen's rise from closeted pornographer to celebrated artist so flaccid?
More delicately, the film brings to life the desire that lit the artist's genius, until he'd filled the entire world with leather gods and muscle studs.