Parky at the Pictures (DVD 9/11/2017)

Following a gentle wheelchair trip around the gardens at Versailles in the summer of 1715, Louis XIV (Jean-Pierre Léaud) returns to the palace to view the evening's revels from his couch. The camera keeps his profile in a tight close-up, with the shallow depth of field suggesting that the king no longer cares too much about the blurred figures milling around the salon. Indeed, he is much more interested in the dogs he has not seen for 20 days because Dr Fagon (Patrick d'Assumçao) disapproves. But, when three young ladies come to request his company, Louis remembers the duties of the métier he undertook to neutralise his feuding nobility and summons Blouin (Marc Susini) the valet to fetch his hat. He sits up to perch it on his voluminous wig and doffs it to the curtseying beauties, who applaud his civility.

Fagon uses a box of china eyeballs and a magnifying glass to examine Louis's pupils and declares that donkey's milk would help him regain his strength. He also indulges in a little gossip about two of the female courtiers after Louis inquires about their naked bodies. But, while he recommends them both, he suggests one is a little more discreet if Louis was thinking about amusing himself with them. However, his public role always takes priority and he manages a couple of spoonfuls of boiled egg and a small biscotti to reassure the assembled aristocrats that his appetite has returned.

In spite of his indisposition, affairs of state still revolve around the Sun King and he is shown plans for some coastal fortifications by the Duc d'Orleans (Francis Montaulard) and promises to give the choice of stone his careful consideration. But the sheer effort involved in walking a few steps while leaning on the arms of his servants leaves Louis exhausted and he wakes in the night with an excruciating pain in his leg that causes him to throw back the sheets and call for water. When an inexperienced footman ventures into his bedroom, Louis chides him for not bringing a crystal glass and bellows for Blouin before wearing himself out.

Nevertheless, the next morning, Louis insists on hearing mass in his chapel and he is helped into his wheelchair. Left alone with Fagon, Blouin asks if the king's sugary diet is hindering his recovery and joins with Mareschal (Bernard Belin) in suggesting that they invite doctors from the Sorbonne to examine him. But Fagon quotes Molière in dismissing them as charlatans who are better looking after books than patients. But he is concerned by Louis growing incapacity and the agony he endures while having ointment and bandages applied to his game leg. He cancels a meeting with Le Pelletier (Alain Lajoinie) so that the king can rest, but he senses a growing disquiet within the king's inner circle after Louis gets ready to meet his ministers and then decides he needs to rest.

Fagon allows him to keep a caged bird beside the bed. But, as he and Blouin try to nap in an antechamber, he is annoyed when the valet asserts that birds carry germs after he had disobeyed his orders by letting the king see his hounds. He dismisses the theories of Blouin's mother and warns him against challenging his authority by trying to smuggle in Dr Lebrun (Vicenç Altaió), who has a reputation among Fagon's friends in Marseilles for being a quack. In a bid to keep him away and aware that the black marks on Louiss leg signify the onset of gangrene, Fagon consents to letting five physicians from the Sorbonne (Olivier Cadiot, Philippe Crespeau, Alain Reynaud, Richard Plano and José Wallenstein) examine him. They mutter among themselves that things appear grave, but promise their sovereign that they will do everything they can for him.

Louis rallies on hearing drums and oboes from Saint-Louis and Madame de Maintenon (Irène Silvagni) suggests that some Italian musicians come to play for her lover after he struggles to swallow his broth. Père Le Tellier (Jacques Henric) concurs, but the king feels nauseated by the stench in the room and wishes he could vomit. Yet he recovers his poise in time for a visit from his five year-old great-grandson (Aksil Meznad). He urges him to be his own king and not to succumb to his own fondness for war. As he hugs the boy, he reminds him to keep the people faithful to God and sinks back on his pillow, telling his rosary, as he closes his eyes.

During the night, however, the pain in his leg is so extreme that Blouin is woken by Louis's moans. He insists on confessing to Le Tellier and Fagon is so distressed by the black marks on the skin that he allows Lebrun to administer his elixir, even though he is certain its mix of bull's sperm and blood, frog fat and distilled brain fluid will prove useless. Indeed, he orders Lebrun to drink a draft to prove it has no ill-effects and asks about his qualifications, as he shows the empty glass to the Sorbonne masters. Yet, even though Louis blenches on tasting the liquid and refuses more than a sip, Lebrun insists that his health and youth are returning, as the put-upon monarch drifts off to sleep.

The following morning, Louis seems calmer and Fagon wonders whether they potion might have worked after all. However, the Sorbonne scholars scoff at Lebrun when he explains that the patients respond better to natural remedies than human intervention because of the connection between the body and the earth. They remind him that they have cured the king of past problems, including syphilis, and shakes their heads in disbelief when he compares the disease to roses in wintertime and cites Arnau de Vilanova's On the Physiology of Love as his bible.

While they expose Lebrun, the Duc d'Orleans returns to Louis's bedside to persuade him to finance the defence plans. However, he is interrupted by Cardinal de Rohan (Philippe Dion), who has been summoned to administer the last rites. However, Louis reassures him that he merely felt dizzy and is not yet at death's door. Nevertheless, Madame de Maintenon and the chancellor (François Bosselut) help the king burn some documents that he does not wish to leave to posterity. Blouin burns his fingers, but he is still present when Rohan comes to celebrate mass and receives communion along with Le Tellier. Louis, however, has a biscotti and some wine from Alicante, as the Kyrie is sung.

Having asked that his heart is mummified like his father's was before him, Louis asks for a pot of hot-cold poultry. Fagon and the other doctors are puzzled by the request, but take it as a good sign. But they have no idea what he is trying to say when he starts to babble in a language they don't understand and the close up of the king's blackened foot suggests that his time is drawing nigh. Eager to ensure that they cannot be blamed for failing to save him (as they wonder whether they should have amputated the leg), they agree to declare Lebrun a scoundrel and recommend that the king has him thrown into the Bastille. They retire to allow Rohan to give him Extreme Unction and he forgives Louis's sins in hoping that he can depart in peace.

After repeated attempts to tempt the king with food and wine, Fagon presses a small bottle to his lips. Orleans, who will act as regent, stands beside the bed, as Fagon announces that Louis has died. The assembled courtiers shed tears from a combination of distress and decorum, as the doctors conduct an instant autopsy. They marvel as the size of the deceased's intestine and detect further evidence of gangrene in the stomach. Fagon apologises for not being advanced enough to have saved Louis. But, as he looks into the lens, he promises that they will do better next time.

Working with three digital cameras and a restricted budget, Serra and Jonathan Ricquebourg match the efforts of Stanley Kubrick and John Alcott in Barry Lyndon (1975) in creating visual magic from a limited light source. In particular, they capture the rich textures and the sumptuous reds and golds in Sebastian Vogler's sets and Nina Avramovic's costumes. Hair stylist Antoine Mancini also merits mention for the astonishing wig sported by the sublime Jean-Pierre Léaud, who delivers in relentless close-up a display of subtle wit and faded glory that is all the more remarkable for its selfless lack of vanity. Whether drawing on his last reserves of divine right regality or acquiescing in the inevitability of his human fallibility, Léaud evokes memories of his seminal 60s performances as Truffaut's alter ego, Antoine Doinel, and his later reinvention as Jean-Luc Godard's subversive everyman. And, in the process, he allows the Catalan Serra to pay homage to a form of personal film-making that is in grave danger of being eclipsed in an industry ever more concerned with the bottom line.

Patrick d'Assumçao and Marc Susini provide wonderfully natural support as Fagon and Blouin, while Vicenç Altaió limns Fabrice Luchini at his most feckless as the despicable Lebrun. But, while Serra and co-scenarist Thierry Lounas (who have based their script on contemporary medical records and the memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon) manage to say a lot in a few words about the Bourbon court, they leave plenty of space for Jordi Ribas and Anne Dupouy to pick up every telling sound, from the panting and chirruping of Louis's pets to the sonorous ticking of clocks and the increasing shallowness of the expiring ruler's breathing, as his 72-year reign draws inexorably to its close.

It's impossible to gauge the impact that the work of Touko Laaksonen had on gay iconography. His work has been celebrated on screen before in than James Williams's short Boots, Biceps and Bulges (1988) and Ilppo Pohjola's documentary Daddy and the Muscle Academy (1991). But the art or pornography debate that surrounds the 3500 or so homoerotic drawings that Laaksonen produced during his 40-year career is barely touched upon in Dome Karukoski's handsome, respectful, but underwhelmingly bland biopic, Tom of Finland.

While fighting in the Continuation War against the Soviet Union, twentysomething Touko Laaksonen (Pekka Strang) leaves a Helsinki cinema to follow Captain Heikki Alijoki (Taisto Oksanen) into the bushes in a nearby park. They meet again a few days later in woodland following an air raid and Touko reveals that he wants to play piano and draw when the conflict is over. Alijoki jokes about demanding an invitation to his exhibition at the Louvre and allows him to keep his silver cigarette case. But, before his war is over, Touko stabs a Soviet paratrooper while relieving himself in the forest and the twin images of the rabbit that had hopped past him in a moment of innocent escape and the face of the dead Russian would remain with him for the rest of his life.

Following the defeat of the Nazis who had been Finland's wartime ally, Touko shares a Helsinki apartment with his sister Kaija (Jessica Grabowsky), who wishes that he would get a proper job so they can afford black market cheese. When he has a nightmare, Kaija comes to his room and suggests that he finds someone special to take care of him. However, she is dismayed when he hints that he had same-sex liaisons in uniform and she makes excuses about combat confusion in urging him to lead a normal life.

But, when not working as an art director for an advertising company, Touko is drawing hunks in provocative poses and he slips the sketches under the cubicle divide in a nightclub washroom. On the first occasion he tries making covert contact in this way, he is punched by an affronted customer and thrown out of the club. But he has more luck around the time of the 1952 Olympics during a park encounter with Nipa (Lauri Tilkanen), who is eager for action and takes fearsome beating from the patrolling police to allow Touko to slip away unnoticed. He returns to his room and guzzles whisky while thinking back to the parachutist and fetishising his uniform and moustache to create his famous leather-clad character, Kake (Niklas Hogner), who sits on the sofa behind Touko's desk with a grin of knowing self-satisfaction on his face.

Asked at work to improve the graphics for a coffee campaign, Touko poses workmates Gabriel (Martin Bahne) and Maria (Ksenia Lelesh) on a couch and asks them to imagine they are gazing at each other the morning after their first intimacy. They get the giggles and he snaps them with a camera and so delights the boss that Kaija has high hopes for his promotion. However, he refuses to let her see his Kake drawings and, seeks to distract her with a lightning sketch challenge. He is surprised by her talent and encourages her to show her work, despite his own insistence on secrecy.

Taking a trip to Berlin, Touko helps to find a publisher for his pictures and has a torrid night with a collector he meets in a bar. When he wakes the next morning, however, he finds the stranger has stolen his passport, wallet and portfolio and Touko is arrested for trying to leave his hotel without paying. Consul Sahlin (Kari Hietalahti) is content to leave such a disreputable compatriot to face the music. But he mentions the name Alijoki and Touko demands to see him because they fought together during the war. On entering the cell (where a guard had just informed Touko that his kind were gassed during the Third Reich), Alijoki recognises the cigarette case. Keen to avoid a scandal that could damage his own reputation, he persuades the Germans to let Touko go when he swears his innocence on his honour as an officer.

Shortly after Touko's release, he realises that new lodger Veli Mäkinen is Nipa and both he and Kaija develop a crush on him. They go to watch him dance, but Veli makes it clear that if he had ever met Touko before he must have been drunk. The resentment between the siblings begins to simmer. Thus, when they attend the same party, they each force the other to kiss Heidi (Ida Koski) during a game of truth or dare. They also try to catch Veli's eye during a Midsummer reunion at the family's lakeside summer house, with Kaija even rolling down the meadow slope in the hope of seeing the face of her future husband in the water. But Touko kisses Veli instead and they become lovers and Veli urges Touko to share his drawings with others.

At one of Alijoki's regular poker parties - which he hosts with his understanding wife (Meri Nenonen) - Touko hands etchings around and they soon start to sell through various under-the-counter outlets across the city. They also start a motorcycling club, with Touko taking lots of pictures of men in leathers and peaked caps. But the police raid Alijoki's home and Touko is disappointed by his eagerness to be cured when he is placed in an asylum. They sit in a snow-covered garden and echo the conversation Touko had had with Veli about Finland accepting homosexuality.

Despite claiming not to be a freedom fighter, Touko follows Veli's advice and posts some photographs of his best work to the editor of the Physique Pictorial magazine in California (Þorsteinn Bachmann). He is bowled over by the images and renames the artist `Tom of Finland' in time for the Spring 1957 issue. Doug (Seumas F. Sargent) and his gym bunny boyfriend Jack (Jacob Oftebro) soon become big fans and invite Touko to visit with a view to mounting an exhibition. Touko is astonished to see how openly gay men hold hands in the street and immediately feels at home at Doug's home, which forever seems to be hosting a hunk-strewn pool party. Even when the cops burst in looking for a robbery suspect, they pay no heed to the garden antics and Touko is struck by the contrast with the oppression he has to endure back home.

He is also touched by the greeting he receives at a bar in New York, where he spots some of the stolen Berlin drawings in a cheap porn mag. Doug tracks down the publisher, Mannheim (Haymon Maria Buttinger), and threatens legal action unless he issues a Kake book on good quality paper. As Veli hasn't made the trip, Touko brings him back a personal copy and notices that he has developed a persistent cough.

One of the film's major flaws is its haphazard approach to the passage of time and Karukoski lurches forward awkwardly to 1981 to show Veli succumbing to throat cancer shortly after Touko fulfils a long-cherished dream to have yellow curtains. Kaija is also upset by the death and tries to fuss over Touko. However, she is so disgusted when he finally shows her his drawings that she starts hoovering without another word. Eventually, she leaves the apartment to let Touko take a phone call from Doug, in which he declares that his drawings are being blamed for the spread of the AIDS virus.

Touko hops on a plane and thinks back to how he rallied his troops in the forest by singing the national anthem. He lands in a very different America, as gay men are afraid of both the disease and the homophobic backlash. Touko and Doug smuggle a white rabbit into hospital to show Jack, who is fading fast. Despite his condition, he insists he wouldn't change a thing and thanks Touko for the pictures that set him free.

Inspired to do something to alert the gay community to the benefits of safe sex, Touko starts drawing again and Doug helps him find Zagat (Manfred Böll), an elderly Jewish religious publisher who is prepared to print a new book. A montage shows how Tom of Finland became culturally accepted and the film ends, where it began, with Touko and Doug sitting in a large, wood-panelled antechamber. They joke about who let the rabbit out before Touko enters a theatre packed to the rafters with Tom's men cheering to the echo in gratitude for what he gave them in terms of identity and liberty. The credits roll to Sylvester belting out the disco anthem, `Take Me to Heaven'.

Touko Laaksonen was 71 when he died following a stroke brought on by emphysema. But his legacy has burgeoned in the subsequent quarter century. Everyone from Freddie Mercury to George Michael has copied his biker look, while the Village People virtually became living embodiments of the Kake sub-culture. Moreover, Tom of Finland even became a national icon and became the first homoerotic artist to have his work depicted on postage stamps. Yet, while he subtly implies that Touko's wartime experiences played as big a part as his fantasies in concocting his square-jawed, well-hung, bubble-butted studs, Karukoski ducks discussing his fixation with German uniforms and fails to come close to conveying the importance of his graphic style in either artistic or social terms.

The scenes set in postwar Helsinki are admirably atmospheric, with cinematographer Lasse Frank Johannessen employing subdued lighting and muted colours to capture the dual sense of daring and dread that pervades Touko's clandestine nocturnal escapades. Production designer Christian Olander makes equally artful use of hue and shadow in recreating Touko's bedroom, Helsinki's sinks of depravity and the Berlin prison cell. Anna Vilppunen's costumes and Lasse Enersen and Hildur Guðnadóttir's melodic cello score also merit mention. But, while he also makes a decent job of contrasting Finnish bleakness with the California sunscapes, the narrative begins to unravel in the final third, as though screenwriter Aleksi Bardy has been told they have run out of film to fit in the last 30 years of his unassuming hero's life.

Having taken such pains to establish the characters of Touko, Kaija and Veli, Bardy and Karukoski settle for Doug (a stand-in for Durk Dehner) and Jack being ciphers to be whizzed through scenes of post-Stonewall delirium and HIV heartache that seem to topple in on one another. The reasons for Touko's Stateside rise to fame get lost in the shuffle, hence the announcement that he is being blamed for the epidemic coming across as a melodramatic contrivance. His dash to press with a book urging the use of condoms similarly feels rushed, while the closing rapturous reception almost feels cartoonish. This is a huge shame, as Karukoski and Bardy clearly have their hearts in the right place. But they seem scared of causing offence by showing any nudity or any sort of lustful physicality. Moreover, their denouement does a disservice to both Touko Laaksonen and Pekka Strang, who plays the taciturn Tom with a steadily burning pride in his status as both an artist and a gay man. But there's not even a hint of the transgressive thrill that made him a legend.

A disciple of Antonio Reis, Portuguese auteur João Pedro Rodrigues has spent the last two decades provoking audiences with such homoerotic outings as O Fantasma (2000), Two Drifters (2005), To Die Like a Man (2009) and The Last Time I Saw Macao (2012). However, he is likely to ruffle the most features with The Ornithologist, a loose reworking of the life of St Anthony of Padua, whose self-reflexive, hagio-sceptic subversion contains flashes of Luis Buñuel, Derek Jarman and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Although he died in Padua, St Anthony was born Fernando Martins de Bulhões in Lisbon in 1195 and the film opens with a quotation from the Franciscan's Whit Sunday sermon at Forli in 1222, which proclaims the sense of warmth and exaltation to be derived from accepting the Holy Spirit. As he swims in a woodland river near some nesting birds, ornithologist Fernando (Paul Hamy) certainly seems to be at one with Nature. He chats briefly to his friend, Sergio, who reminds him to take his medication. But the signal is weak and they hang up before the brown-hoodied Fernando packs away his camping equipment and heads upstream in his kayak.

The craft looks fragile from the gliding aerial shots approximating the perspectives of the birds Fernando watches through his binoculars. He makes dictaphone notes as he sees birds of prey nesting on craggy inclines and even spots a goat that has strayed close to a nest. But he is so busy watching one large swooping bird that he fails to notice has is drifting towards some rapids and he capsizes and is found on the shore by lesbian Chinese Catholics Fei (Han Wen) and Lin (Chan Suan), who are trekking along the Camino de Santiago to the shrine of St James at Santiago de Compostela. Lin takes a picture of him (a montage of her snaps en route precedes the discovery) and she reminds Fei that St Anthony would expect them to tend to a fellow mortal in need.

The pilgrims revive and feed Fernando and explain in English that they are lost. He reveals that they have crossed into Portugal and they ask him to escort them back to the right path. They also ask him to protect them from the forest spirits that have been frightening them and are so disappointed when he denies the existence of God, the Devil and ghosts that they force him to sleep outside their tent. When he wakes the next morning, however, they have trussed him with ropes like St Sebastian and Lin slaps his face when he spits at her after refusing food. Wearing only his white underpants, he struggles to get loose, but waits until darkness falls before freeing his hands and stealing back his clothes. As he rummages in their rucksacks, the women plot in Chinese to castrate him, as he deserves no better.

Striding out across country, Fernando finds a high outcrop to check his messages and realises the women have stolen his medication. He spots the shattered hull of his kayak and tosses his phone away in frustration when he fails to pick up a signal. But he retrieves it and continues on his way inland without the benefit of his map, which has also been pinched. Eventually, he finds his camp and is puzzled by the fact that the other half of his kayak has been erected like a totem pole and that white balloons have been tied to the bare branches of the nearby trees. His eyes have been burnt out of his ID card photo and he note on his dictaphone that Lin and Fei were right about something odd going on in the forest.

Having crossed the river with his backpack out of the water, Fernando goes for a swim and is conscious of a hawk hovering over him, just as he was earlier aware of a helicopter flying overhead. As night falls, he is woken in his tent by the round of revelry and he creeps out to find a group of seven men in bird costumes whooping around a fire in the Mirandese dialect. One goes to relieve himself close to where Fernando is hiding and, having received an unconventional baptism, he looks on with trepidation as they slaughter and decapitate a wild boar while proclaiming that no one can stop them from realising their destiny.

He is woken by a sheepdog the following morning and he is surprised to see Jesus (Xelo Cagiao) drinking milk straight from a goat's udder. He is deaf and unable to speak, but he shows Fernando how to use a whistle to control his dog. He also writes his name in the sand after they skinny dip and Fernando lets Jesus use his binoculars to watch the swimming birds. The naked youth leans into the older man and they kiss. As they dress after making love, however, Fernando recognises his brown hoodie and accuses Jesus of stealing it. They fight and Jesus is accidentally stabbed with his own knife. The dog laps at the blood pouring from the wound in its master's side, as Fernando washes his shirt in the river and climbs up towards a cross fixed to a high peak.

Trudging on, he finds apples on a tree and takes some eggs from a nest. He eats them while resting in an abandoned graveyard and he is spooked by the statues of Christ with a Roman soldier and an angel with piercing eyes. Taken aback by a playfully threatening message from Fei and Lin on his dictaphone, Fernando settles to sleep in his tent and is disturbed by a white dove with a broken wing. He applies a simple splint and makes a nest for the bird to sleep. But it appears fine the next morning and flies away with a cheerful coo.

However, it perches on a stone after Fernando passes through a grove filled with stuffed wild animals and he throws his phone at the bird to make it fly away. Looking down, he sees a human skull in the undergrowth and his box of pills. He empties them on to the ground and puts his ID card inside a plastic bag and floats it off downstream. Having burnt off his fingerprints, Fernando talks to the fish that gather when he tosses some of his supper into the water and he urges them to leave this dark place and swim somewhere cleaner.

When he wakes next morning, he hears a hunting horn and sees a blonde hunter (Juliane Elting) riding with two topless female companions (Flora Flora Bulcão and Isabelle Puntel). He is stunned when a shot rings out and the Latin-speaking blonde is touched by how calm the animals are around the stranger. They offer to help him back to civilisation, but he insists he is happy where he is. Bidding farewell, the trio rename him Anthony and they entrust him to the dove, which is sitting in a nearby tree.

Following the bird's lead, he finds one of the birdmen lying in a clearing. Finding a gash in his side, Anthony puts his fingers into the hole and cuts away the mask to reveal Jesus. However, on giving him the kiss of life, he reveals himself to be his twin brother, Thomas (also Cagiao), who recognises his sibling's knife and whistle. He threatens Anthony, who insists he is no longer the man he was (as he is now being played by João Pedro Rodrigues himself). But Thomas stabs him in the throat and Fernando/Anthony's face changes between Hamy and Rodrigues as he clutches the spurting wound and the moon bathes the woods in a red glow.

The next morning, a magpie lies dead in a gutter beside a busy road leading into Padua. Anthony (Rodrigues) walks along with his hood up alongside Thomas in his bird costume. A couple of girls (presumably Lin and Fei) call out to him from across the road and he blesses them before taking Thomas's hand and walking into the city.

Those unfamiliar with Christian iconography and Portuguese folklore might find themselves at a loss at various points during this demanding rustic reverie. Yet there's still much to ponder, as Paul Hamy puts his survival instincts to the test on a journey of self-discovery that is made all the more tantalising by Hamy's climactic transformation into the director and Fernando's reinvention as the patron saint of the lost. In addition to musing on the relevance of religion to modern society and the difficulty of communicating in our hi-tec age, Rodrigues and co-scenarist João Rui Guerra da Mata also explore man's relationships with women, animals, birds and spirits and seem to suggest that there is still much to be learnt from simpler and purer lifestyles.

However, one suspects that the majority of viewers will derive their own message from an exercise in Slow Cinema that has been beautifully photographed by Rui Poças, whose evocative images of the northern Portuguese countryside are enlivened by Nuno Carvalho''s magnificent sound design. The jagged riffs of Séverine Ballon's shrill, but sparingly used score are equally effective at keeping the audience on its mettle. But, for all its moments of wonderment and wondering, this parable is also laced with quirkily iconoclastic humour that reinforces the unmistakable Buñuelian undertones.

The inspirational teacher is a recurring screen character the world over and an Estonian educator gets to mould some receptive young minds in the Stalinist era in Klaus Härö's The Fencer. Chronicling a fugitive swordsman's bid to prove to his apparatchik principal that fencing is not a feudal and insufficiently proletarian pursuit, this might have been called Dead Sports Society. But, while it may seems a little conventional at times, this affecting biopic of fabled fencing master Endel Nelis capably captures the mood of suspicion and paranoia that pervaded the most northerly Baltic state in the immediate postwar period.

Following the Nazi invasion of Estonia in 1941, thousands of young men were drafted into the Wehrmacht (although many also volunteered to fight against the detested Red Army). They were declared traitors after the war and the Communist secret police continued to hunt down the conscripts into the early 1950s. Among them was Endel Keller, a decorated fencer who adopted his mothers maiden name, Nelis, after fleeing from the KGB in Leningrad.

In 1952, Nelis (Märt Avandi) applies to become a PE teacher at a small school in the remote Estonian town of Haapsalu. Noting the reference to fencing on his resumé, the principal (Hendrik Toompere) urges him to stick to modern sports more in keeping with Party ideology. But, as the local military base has first dibs on the school skiing equipment, Nelis struggles to connect with his classes and turns to fencing after the inquisitive Marta (Liisa Koppel) asks about the gold medal attached to the foil he keeps hidden in his locker.

Despite confessing to sympathetic colleague Kadri (Ursula Ratasepp) that he is not good with children, Nelis forms a Saturday fencing club and is surprised by the turnout at the first session. He demonstrates the basics of posture and balance and Marta and younger sister Tiiu (Elbe Reiter) prove just as enthusiastic as older boys Jaan (Joonas Koff) and Toomas (Egert Kadastu). Kadri reminds Nelis that many of the students lost their fathers during the war or saw them being taken away by the secret police and, consequently, he defies the principal's veiled threats to make swords from some sturdy reeds gathered from the coastal marshes.

As romance tentatively blossoms with Kadri, Nelis is warned over the phone by his former coach, Alexei (Kirill Käro), to keep his head down, as the KGB are still making inquiries. Nelis is also befriended by Jaan's grandfather (Lembit Ulfsak), who had fenced in his youth at the University of Leipzig. He gives Jaan his rapier and mask and speaks out at a school meeting when the principal and his subservient assistant (Jaak Prints) recommend scrapping the fencing club. The old man points out that Karl Marx had enjoyed the sport and the principal is so piqued when the parents vote to save the club that has restored a little purpose and pleasure to the fraught lives of their children that he instructs his underling to delve into Nelis's background.

Shortly afterwards, Nelis thinks he is being followed home. But Alexei has tracked him down with an offer to spar with a discreet patron who will protect him. Yet, despite packing his bags, Nelis remains on the station platform because he can't let his students down and Alexei rewards his dedication by sending two large crates of secondhand fencing equipment. The students are delighted and implore Nelis to allow them to enter a school competition in Leningrad. Aware of the danger he faces in returning to the city, he tells them they are too inexperienced for such a prestigious event and Marta hands back the gold medal he had given her in disgust.

A couple of days later, Jaan's grandfather is arrested and Kadri becomes afraid when Alexei calls to warn Nelis that the KGB are closing in on him. He explains that he was 18 when the Germans came and deserted as soon as he could. But he knows he is forever tainted and Kadri pleads with him to stay away from Leningrad.

Wandering into the gymnasium after hours, Nelis finds Jaan practicing alone and he is so moved by his courage that he agrees to enter the contest. He picks Jaan, Toomas and Lea (Ann-Lisett Rebane) for the team and makes Marta first reserve. Kadri prepares sandwiches for the long train journey and the children gaze at the Leningrad skyline through the grubby window. On arriving at the venue, however, Nelis is informed that the school will be disqualified unless he can borrow some electric épées. Fortunately, Armenian coach Shirin (Alina Karmazina) comes to his rescue and the team lines up against squads from some of the biggest cities in the Soviet Union. But, as Jaan and Toomas win their bouts, Nelis spots soldiers in the balcony and decides to escape.

As he descends a staircase, however, he bumps into the principal. Protesting that he is merely doing his duty, he assures Nelis that he has nothing against him and advises him to flee. But Nelis realises he is trapped and returns to the main hall as the Haapsalu underdogs win through to face Moscow in the final. All seems to be going well. But Jaan sprains his ankle while leading in the decisive bout and Marta has to step against an opponent who is almost twice her size. It goes into overtime, but Marta prevails with a last-second thrust and Nelis looks back with pride as he is led away by the police.

Following a caption proclaiming the amnesty that followed the death of Joseph Stalin on 5 March 1953, Nelis alights from his train to be greeted by Kadri. Before they can embrace, however, Marta and Tiiu rush out from their hiding place on the platform and Nelis is soon surrounded by his adoring students. A closing note reveals that he lived to see Estonian independence and that the fencing club he founded is still going strong.

Klaus Härö is no stranger to period pieces and this latest venture into the past followed Elina: As If I Wasn't There (2003), Mother of Mine (2005) and Letters to Father Jacobs (2009) in being selected as Finland's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. In collaboration with production designer Jaagup Roomet and cinematographer Tuomo Hutri, he ably contrasts the spartan backwater gym with the Hammer and Sickle-swathed grandeur of the big city arena. Moreover, he sustains a palpable sense of unease, as Nelis treats each encounter with a stranger as a potential ambush.

Butt, despite the best efforts of comic actor Märt Avandi, Nelis remains something of an enigma, whose wartime exploits are never satisfactorily explained. Similarly, the love affair with the winsome Ursula Ratasepp is sweet, but schematic, while the bonds forged with Liisa Koppel and Joonas Koff seem too cursory to inspire a climactic act of reckless self-sacrifice. Yet, notwithstanding the sketchy nature of some of screenwriter Anna Heinamaa's storytelling, Härö's sense of pace and place is assured and deftly counterpointed by a Gert Wilden, Jr's liltingly sombre score.