London orchestras do communicate with each other, sometimes at least, when it comes to programming.
It was on the strength of a single concert including a startling Sibelius Luonnotar and Third Symphony, thankfully reported here, that Sakari Oramo was appointed Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. We had to wait a while for more major Sibelius from them, revelling in the meanwhile in the team’s superlative Nielsen cycle.
No sunshine without shadows was one possible theme rippling through this diva sandwich of a Prom. Even Richard Strauss's chaste nymph Daphne, achieving longed-for metamorphosis as a tree, finds darkness among the roots; and though Renée "The Beautiful Voice" Fleming has a heliotropic tendency in her refulgent upper register, her mezzo-ish colours are strong, too.
True to their name, Finland’s Man Duo are male and there are two of them. The better-known half is former Helsinki tram driver Jaakko Eino Kalevi. Born Jaakko Savolainen – the Kalevi nods to his home country’s epic tale, The Kalevala – his long solo discography stretches back to 2001. That year, he made a collaborative single with Sami Toroi, who traded as Long-Sam. Following a 2012 album credited to Jaakko Eino Kalevi & Long-Sam they’re back, but as Man Duo.
Finnish director Dome Karukoski has made a sympathetic and quietly stylish biopic of Touko Laaksonen, the artist who did as much as anyone to define 20th century male gay visual culture. There’s a degree of irony in the fact that we know him by his national pseudonym – he started signing his work “Tom” for anonymity, while “of Finland” was thought up by an American publisher – given that post-war Helsinki is depicted here as about as repressive an environment for a young man exploring his sexuality as could be imagined. Asked at one point whether he has published his work in his homeland, Laaksonen replies, without a trace of irony, that it would be more likely to appear in the Vatican.
Karukoski and screenwriter Aleksi Bardy give the film’s first half over to the artist’s early years, and it feels considerably more organic and contained than the second, which tells of Laaksonen’s discovery of, and by America. It opens with his military service in the Russo-Finnish war, when he first started cruising night-time parks; that resulted in unexpected comradeship with some of his fellow soldiers, as well as providing the origins of his visual iconography. Police repression, and the violence with which it was often associated, became somehow absorbed into his images of strong men, often in uniform. One particular wartime experience – a murderous encounter with a Russian parachutist – is given special significance: Laaksonen clearly came out of the war traumatised.
The film’s final scene movingly brings home the full trajectory of his journey
After the conflict ended, he shared a flat with younger sister Kaija (Jessica Grabowsky), also an artist, and life slowly began to look up. Laaksonen started to work in advertising, in due course becoming art director at a major agency. But the subjects he made his own – his trademark heavily muscled and phallused men in tight uniform and leather – had to be kept locked away. Even a trip to more progressive Berlin confirmed his anxieties.
But the arrival, as the siblings’ lodger, of the beautiful Veli (Lauri Tilkanen), a dancer, slowly began to change Tom’s world – although Karukoski leaves the details of their relationship rather undeveloped – and gave him an increasing confidence in his work, which started to circulate among friends. His signature fetishisation began to include bikers. “We have started a motorcycle club, only without motorcycles,” he tells one old friend from the war years, with a new element of humour, even if such levity is qualified by the fact that the friend concerned has been disgraced after a police raid and is now in an asylum, determined to “cure” himself of his homosexual orientation. (Pictured below: from left, Lauri Tilkanen, Jessica Grabowsky, Pekka Strang)
Designer Christian Olander portrays this dark Helsinki world through a palette of subdued colours, greys and blues (we only see the Finnish sun once, on a summer day out in the archipelago). Which also works just right in setting up the contrast to Tom’s first trip to California, with its bright colours and sheer enjoyment of physical beauty. First published in the mid-1950s in Physique Pictorial – the magazine was beginning to fascinate David Hockney at about the same time – the artist’s work was initiating a whole style of American gay life, one that, it feels, left Laaksonen himself with some catching up to do. He had, in every sense, arrived in another world.
Along the way Karukoski rather jumbles his timeline, virtually skipping a decade or so, but it doesn’t detract from the whole. There’s definite digression in the director expanding his story to include Laaksonen’s first American fan, and later close friend Doug (Seumas Sargent) with unlinked episodes from his life. The closing of Tom’s Helsinki life is dealt with somewhat perfunctorily, especially in his relation to his sister Kaija who either has or hasn’t – it’s never quite clear – understood all along what was going on in her brother’s life. The onset of AIDS in the 1980s, which brought a backlash against Tom’s art, is rather unconvincingly set against an all too obvious feel-good plot diversion.
But for viewers sympathetic to the film’s subject – and Karukoski has made a sufficiently mainstream film for that number to include a considerably wider audience than might be expected – all that will seem carping. Pekka Strang turns in a very accomplished performance as Tom, as convincing at the age of 20 as at 70, with a certain haggard, occasionally uneasy distraction that seems particularly fitting for the early years. The film’s final scene movingly brings home the full trajectory of his journey – how, out of the pain and isolation of his early years, he created and helped to define a subculture that became emblematic for so many gay men the world over. It will be a stony-hearted viewer indeed who resists the celebration of Tom of Finland’s conclusion.
Tears were likely to flow freely on this most beautiful and terrible of June evenings, especially given a programme – dedicated by Vladimir Ashkenazy to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire – already prone to the elegiac. It could hardly be otherwise with the music of Elgar and Sibelius, two Europeans with a penchant for introspection whose works Ashkenazy knows well.
It takes real skill to make a film about a desperate Syrian refugee and a dour middle-aged Finn reinventing himself and turn it into the warmest, most life-enhancing film I’ve seen this year. But Aki Kaurismäki has form, he’s been making movies which defy genres – are they absurdist or social realist, tragic or comic? – for 30 years now. His films do well at festivals – The Other Side of Hope won Berlinale's Silver Bear for best director this year – and regularly find their way onto the indie circuit but they never make it in the multiplex: you’ll need to be quick to catch this one on a big screen, which is where it belongs.
There’s some thematic overlap here with Kaurismäki’s most recent film, 2011’s Le Havre, which also featured a refugee finding an unexpected ally in France, but the director is back on home turf here and it's a shade darker - there are encounters with Nordic neo-Nazis and chilly officialdom. Khaled (Sherwan Kaji) has been travelling for months since his home in Aleppo was bombed while his family were having lunch; the only other survivor was his sister, Miriam and he’s lost her in some hellish border camp.
Finding Miriam is his sole reason to live, and he’s been criss-crossing borders searching for her before ending up by mistake on a freighter bound for Finland. Khaled's journey is intercut with the story of Waldemar Wikström (Sakari Kuosmanen) who is also on the run, but from the boredom of marriage and work. There's a lovely deadpan scene where his wife sits in the kitchen, her hair in rollers mimicked visually by the giant cactus on the table, and dumps his discarded wedding ring among the cigarette butts.
Wikström also jettisons his boring job selling clothes to small outfitters around the country. He flogs off his stock of cellophane-wrapped shirts for a derisory sum and is left with his big old car and a handful of cash. Instead of heading for sunnier climes, he buys a shabby drinkers’ dive, the Golden Pint, where fishballs are always dish of the day. The three surly staff haven’t had their wages paid in months and regard the new owner with suspicion. It's more than an hour into the film before Khaled and Wikström meet, and then it isn't exactly cute – a fight by the restaurants' bins – but a friendship develops.
Much of the comedy lies in the attempt to reinvent the Golden Pint and bring in more customers with a new menu. Transforming into a sushi restaurant (pictured below) backfires horribly when the cook swiftly runs out of fresh fish and resorts to dolloping lumpy clods of wasabi on rinsed-off pickled herring. Where another director would give you the Japanese diners’ disgusted reaction, Kaurismäki just cuts to them walking politely out of the restaurant at the end of the evening, nodding to the staff dressed in their absurd kimonos. Back to the fishballs.
There are many familiar pleasures from the director whose biggest hit was Leningrad Cowboys Go America back in 1989. The Other Side of Hope generously showcases the indigenous bar band circuit of Finland. Who knew that there were still so many hairy Finnish musicians who sound like Dire Straits and sing fabulously miserable songs? And for those mourning Laika, the adorable dog in Le Havre, there is a new dog to provide some winsome comedy at the diner when the health and safety inspectors come to call.
The gently lugubrious humour is matched by superb camerawork (the film is shot on 35mm film by Kaurismäki's longterm cinematographer Timo Salminen). The limited palette and subdued lighting renders every location a glaucous underworld. But this movie isn’t all style and poker-faced comic asides, there’s a really profound humanism in the way the refugees’ stories are told, and a compassion which is all the more impressive for its total lack of sentimentality. Kaurismäki has said that this is his final film; it would be a real shame for him to stop now, but at least he’d be going out on a masterpiece.
Overleaf: watch the official trailer for The Other Side of Hope
Over 1972 to 1975, Finland staged a small-scale invasion of Britain. A friendly one, it was confined to music. First, the progressive rock band Tasavallan Presidentti came to London in May 1972 and played Ronnie Scott’s. The Sunday Times’ Derek Jewell said they were “frighteningly accomplished” and that readers should “watch them soar”. The next year, they toured and appeared on BBC2’s Old Grey Whistle Test.
It's official: if you want to be guaranteed an infallible musical adrenalin boost in London, you can always be sure to find it with Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo and his BBC Symphony Orchestra. And it's not just a question of splashy excitement: Oramo is a rigorous rehearser. Detlev Glanert's fiendish new tone poem Megaris would not have been half as vivid or pleasurable without extraordinary preparation.
Apocalyptica are a band that became famous for playing Metallica on cellos. And tonight they’re playing only Metallica covers because it's 20 years since they released Plays Metallica by Four Cellos, their debut album. The quartet formed at Finland’s Sibelius Academy in 1993 and the man responsible for bringing together classical cellists to play metal is Eicca Toppinen. Tonight, referring to their debut album, he admits that they were “expecting to sell 1,000 CDs”.