Stephen Cone has been building a pretty strong reputation as a writer/director with contemplative LGBT-themed films such as Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party and The Wise Kids. Indeed, New York’s prestigious Museum Of The Moving Image has just finished the ‘Talk About the Passion: Stephen Cone’s First Act’ season, which featured a selection of his film, including his latest, Princess Cyd.

The titular Cyd (Jessie Pinnick) is a 16-year-old who lives with her depressed single father. For the summer she goes to visit her novelist aunt, Miranda (Rebecca Spence), which will both get her away from her dad for a few weeks, and allow her to catch up with her mom’s side of the family, who she hasn’t had a lot of contact with since her mother’s death.

As Cyd and Miranda bond and butt heads over their shared history and Miranda’s books, Cyd also realises she has a freedom she’s never had before. She meets Katie (Malic White), who offers her an unexpected friendship that begins to develop into a romance. However, Cyd is still learning about herself, which causes her to challenge Miranda in ways her aunt didn’t expect, as well as get herself into situations where she has less control than they think.

As they feel each other out, and Cyd starts to explore her sexuality, aunt and niece both finds themselves looking at things in different ways and, sometimes clumsily, working their way towards a new understanding.

Princess Cyd is a quiet film that takes time and space to allow the characters to breath. It generally avoids histrionics and instead lets people evolve, realising that a small change in perspective can be quite profound. Miranda is reserved and academic, a woman whose life is as much lived through the characters in her books as it is in real life. Into that world comes the chaotic force of a teenager – and one who soon announces she doesn’t read – who makes her realise the things she may be missing. Conversely Cyd comes to appreciate some of the order and ritual of Miranda’s life.

It’s also nice that while film convention might make you think that Miranda and Cyd would butt heads over the teen getting a girlfriend, Miranda doesn’t care about the gender of niece’s partner. Instead it allows them to gently press one another or where they are in the world and how they look at intimacy, as well as considering ideas of gender being both performance of the internal and not matching people’s stereotypes.

Hovering in the background of all this Cyd’s mother. While what happened to her isn’t revealed until relatively late into the movie, it informs the film and gives an interesting cross-generational echo between Miranda who was once a teenager alongside Cyd’s mom, and the teenage Cyd who’s grown up without her mother around.

Click here to watch the trailer for Princess Cyd.

Some will find it all a little too quiet and lacking in incident, and there are also those who may find it difficult to relate to the very middle-class milieu of a lot of it (even when Cyd is hanging out with the androgynous Katie and her friends, it’s all seen through quite middle-class eyes). However, those willing to allow the movie the space the breath and to contemplate its characters and their situation, will find it surprisingly rewarding.

For a couple of years duelling biopics of Tom Of Finland were in the works, but this is the one that finally made it to the screen. The life of Touko Laaksonen is certainly an interesting subject to take on, and there are many ways it could have been done. The route they’ve gone down is to make a fairly traditional, prestige biopic, which is perhaps an unexpected choice for a man who made his name for outsider homoerotic art that defied conventions of both sexuality and class.

The film follows the life of Laaksonen, picking up his tale just after he has been discharged from the Finnish Army following the Second World War (the movie rather bypasses Finland complicated position in the conflict, other than that it was hell for the soldiers and also helped set off Touko’s love of Nazi uniforms). While he had encounters with men in the Army, in post-War Finland, being gay is still about furtive and dark meetings in order to avoid society’s rampant homophobia.

His situation isn’t helped by the fact his judgemental sister, colleague and roommate, Kaija (Jessica Grabowsky), doesn’t know he’s gay and doesn’t want to. Tom begins a secret, long-term relationship with another roommate, Veli (Lauri Tilkanen), but while needing to stay deeply closeted in his own life, he begins trying to find an audience for his stylised, homoerotic image of enormously well-endowed, uniformed men and motorcyclists.

The growing success of his imagery – done under what becomes his brand name, Tom Of Finland – leads him beyond Finland, initially to Berlin, before discovering the ‘anything goes’ world of 1970s California.

It’s an entertaining and well told tale from award-winning director Dome Karukoski. The film has a nice eye for style and history, and keeps the viewer pulled in as it illuminates the life behind the iconic imagery. However, other than some surface observations, those hoping to learn more about exactly what it is about Laaksonen’s imagery that caught the gay imagination and continues to appeal today (despite the proliferation of far more explicit imagery), may be a little disappointed.

That’s because rather than exploring the artistry, it’s more interested in cementing the position of the artist. Indeed, there are moments when the film gets a close to being a filmic essay arguing Laaksonen’s position as a key figure in gay liberation, and not just a guy who drew some prurient pictures decades ago. That’s fair enough, but occasionally it takes this a little too far by pretty much suggesting the whole of gay liberation was down to Tom Of Finland. Indeed, the whole section of the movie after Tom first goes to America doesn’t feel quite as disciplined or satisfying as what went before. That’s partly due to the fact at the start of the movie character underpins everything, which ensures emotional involvement in the prejudice and difficulties Touko face. However, later Laaksonen becomes increasingly secondary to the points the film is trying to make about him and his art.

Even that could have been okay, as he is an interesting case study in how the meaning of the art and the artist can be different things – especially as he ‘hid’ behind a pseudonym – but the movie doesn’t fully address that. Similarly, despite being about the seeming disparity between the closeted life Laaksonen had to lead and the open eroticism of his art, the movie itself is sometimes a little coy about the sexual side of Touko’s life, especially his interest in different fetishes and S&M.

Click here to watch the trailer for Tom Of Finland

The film will probably seem suitably risqué to straight audiences, but gay viewers may feel it’s slightly holding back. Indeed, there’s are argument to be made about whether this film is essentially about the gentrification of an artist whose entire raison d’etre was about the fact that what he drew was so far from the gentry in terms of subject, style and class. Indeed, the movie’s frame of reference ultimately turns him into an oddly establishment type figure.

There are undoubtedly things that are problematic about its rather traditional/mainstream take on its subject matter. Admittedly, dealing with those problems would have probably made it even more of a niche film than it already is, but it leaves a movie that is interesting and entertaining, but feels like its missing some key aspects of its subject. It also gets a little messy in its desire to show that ‘Tom’ was important and not just a footnote in gay history.

Overall Verdict: Well worth a watch and undoubtedly entertaining, even if the prestige biopic format means many key aspects of its subject fall by the wayside.