Swedish-speaking Finnish author Tove Jansson gained widespread international fame for her series of Moomin novels, which are one of thise rare beasts, children's literature that flips emotional switches in the psyche of the adult reader too, largely by virtue of their mix of homespun wisdom with a sense of the magic inherent in nature. When she eventually migrated to adult works, living for the latter period of her life on a remote Baltic skerry with her partner, the transition did not jar: the connection to the cycles of nature was as intensely there as ever.
Tove does not concentrate on these periods of her life, but her formative years as an artist during the war and 1950s and her coming to terms with her attraction to women, including an affair with a self-centred theatre director. Alma Pöysti feels like a natural fit as the lead, but the structure of the film ultimately lets it down: yes, we may get a real person, warts and all, but that's not what primarily interests us about Jansson. Her actual work is mostly absent, and then the film ends rather abruptly, feeling just like the first chapter of a trilogy.
6/10
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