Among the year’s oddest cinematic discoveries are the three melodramas gathered in a Blu-ray set from Deaf Crocodile, 3 x Teuvo Tulio. They go so far over the top that sometimes you wouldn’t think the actors could breathe up there.
How to describe the style of these Finnish melodramas? Scholars Rolf Giesen and Dr. Eloise Ross make one attempt in their commentaries, quoting Finland’s most famous filmmaker, Aki Kaurismäki, who declares that Tulio’s melodramas make those of other directors seem like social realism.
That’s a funny remark for a couple of reasons. Kaurismäki’s postmodern romances are about people whose hearts throb with sentiment, but they keep their feelings so restrained and laconic as to verge on parody. Tulio’s characters, on the other hand, never heard of restraint. From the start, Tulio directs his actors to broadcast every emotion broadly enough to be felt outside the theatre.
Indeed, it’s a mode of Expressionist acting that eschews what we call realism. The visual style is somewhat less florid, at least in the earlier films, and perhaps this helps balance the hyper-emoting.
Teuvo Tulio specialized in “suffering woman” films starring his frequent muse, Regina Linnanheimo. A Nordic blonde in the Greta Garbo manner, she takes her heroines through many shifts in intense emotion in scenarios that blend the mundane with the far-fetched. She won the Finnish industry’s Best Actress award for both Tulio films she made in 1946, which are included in this Blu-ray set. She even starred in the Swedish versions of the same films, also directed by Tulio. They were busy artists.
Cross of Love‘s High Style Absurdism
In an emblem or promise of the passionate emotions we’ll be witnessing throughout, Cross of Love (Rakkauden Risti, 1946) opens with a storm at sea stirring up black waves that capsize a sailboat in the night, all to swirling music by Johann Sebastian Bach. The waves crash around a flashing lighthouse, as played by a miniature model.
Inside the lighthouse, an old Popeye-esque bearded galoot moans repeatedly over his delicious hot oatmeal. He looks truly demented, and it doesn’t help that he’s accompanied by a shrieking parrot as well as a dog, a cat, and even a mouse. The montage of animals, with the cat looking straight into the camera in close-up, is as unnerving as the rattling and crashing outside.
When the old man, whom we’ll learn is called Lighthouse Kalle (Oscar Tengström), hears a capsized man yelling for help while clinging to a rock, his response is to grab a rifle and take a potshot at the guy! He yells that he wants no strangers here, and he utters bitter thoughts that the storm will sweep others to their death but not himself. Fortunately, a more responsible younger keeper brings the waterlogged man inside.
The next morning, the younger keeper explains that Kalle goes crazy during storms, but he’s more himself now, and thereby a flashback to what happened five years ago is triggered. By way of background, Kalle’s wife dumped him and his isolated job for life in the city, leaving him with a parrot and a daughter. The flashback, which will occupy the rest of Cross of Love, begins when his restless grown daughter Riita (Linnanheimo) finds another half-drowned man on the shore.
The man turns out to be Mauri Holmberg (Ville Salminen), a wealthy consul with a smarmy mustache that looks penciled on. Riitta glances back mischievously as her father removes the man’s wet trousers. Later, Mauri will eye her with pleasure as she skinny-dips offshore in a startling scene that’s not so distant to prevent us from seeing she’s really nude, front and back.
This is several years before Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika (Sommaren med Monika, 1953) created an international splash with its nudity. If Finnish films already sported skin, we wonder why they weren’t better known.
Cross of Love consistently pushes beyond what you’d see in contemporary Hollywood items, even those about fallen women, as Riitta rushes off to the city with the lizard-like Mauri to be drugged and raped. “I didn’t know you’d take it like this,” says he. “It’s what happens to all women.” She feels compelled to be Mauri’s kept toy.
Turned loose when he tires of her, Riitta obviously has no choice but to turn to prostitution, although later it does occur to her to find a job. Ah, but wait. A sensitive, if clueless, artist named Henrik (Rauli Tuomi) hires her as a model for his painting of a martyred woman crucified on a cross, and the painting earns him fame and money.
In a telling detail, the scene where he’s painting this masterpiece shows him posed in front of a painted backdrop of the city beyond his window, just as an earlier scene of Riitta being swept off her feet by Mauri takes place against a painted sky. All the characters are figures in an artificial landscape.
Will Henrik’s love redeem Riitta’s fate, or will everything go to hell? Place your bets.
There must be viewers who just can’t swing with the eye-rolling twists and turns of stories like this, and they’re probably better off not going to the movies. For that matter, they’d be best to avoid classic literature, for Cross of Love is derived from Alexander Pushkin’s 1831 story “The Stationmaster”. Although the script is freely adapted, Pushkin’s version is highly emotional and has lent itself to several films. Previous examples include Viktor Tourjansky’s Nostalgie (1938) and Gustav Ucicky’s Der Postmeister (1940), which won the Mussolini Cup at the Venice Film Festival.
What matters in Cross of Love is that Tuevo Tulio and his star commit themselves so completely to depicting emotive, sometimes absurd events in high style that the viewer can only gape and feel invested in how things will turn out. Crucial to both the director and the star is the frequent decision to have Riitta, like Kalle’s cat, stare directly into the camera, wide-eyed, while delivering her lines.
This choice is consistent across Tulio’s output. Its point seems to be to turn the spectator into a participant who’s somehow responsible for the heroine. We might extrapolate something about returning the male gaze, except such films were largely fashioned for female spectators, and Tulio’s male characters also stare balefully at the viewer.
Lusty Restless Blood
Tulio’s device of having his heroine and other characters stare into the camera retains its force in Restless Blood (Levoton Veri, 1946), a more spectacular tale starting with situations that would have given Hollywood’s Production Code the hives. To the music of a Chopin waltz that will haunt the drama, the opening credits show two pairs of circles. One pair is two wedding rings, one atop the other. The second pair is the round lenses of dark glasses.
Restless Blood opens on a close-up of the kittenish Outi (Toini Vartiainen) moaning and giggling and pouting at something happening out of frame. We realize her leg is being examined by Dr. Valter Sora (Eino Katajavuori), with whom she flirts shamelessly, even closing her eyes and puckering her lips for a kiss that doesn’t arrive. She insists she’s almost a woman, and he allows that she might be “a quarter to a woman.”
Outi lives with older sister Sylvi (Linnanheimo) and their aged aunt (Elli Yilmaa). The doctor is seriously making eyes at Sylvi as they ride bicycles, lounge in haystacks, and pose in silhouette by a lake, and she agrees to meet him secretly at night. The heartbroken Outi starts curling her lip and boo-hoo-ing without cease when Sylvi breaks this news to her.
Outi rats Sylvi out to the aunt, who rushes to the doctor’s house and bursts upon them naked in bed. Before the aunt can rear up too much on her high horse, Sora says he plans to marry Sylvi, so that’s all right, and she’s a bride in white by the next cut. On her crutches, the bitter and lachrymose Outi sets sail to Paris for surgery and music lessons.
Twenty minutes and five years later, Sylvi and Valter celebrate their little boy’s fifth birthday and pause a moment to wonder why they never hear from Outi. From this point on, Restless Blood will escalate into tragedies co-scripted by Linnanheimo, who often co-wrote Tulio’s films and certainly gave herself juicy scenes.
The dark glasses finally come into play at the 40-minute mark of Restless Blood when, after certain developments, Sylvi goes blind. Now, when she stares straight into the camera, it’s either through those uncanny abyssal lenses or with wide imperious Bette Davis eyes as events become increasingly perverse.
Outi returns home, Valter proves himself to be quite the jerk, and Sylvi goes off the deep end, flashing her orbs all the while. Much of the melodrama stems from her masquerade about whether she can really see. Visible throughout is a nude female statue signifying several things: Valter’s lusts, Outi’s bathing scene (and the moment when Sylvi rips her sister’s top off), Sylvi’s frozen, frustrated sexuality, and perhaps the nature of erotic art itself.
One of Tulio’s defining traits is his love of cutting between characters who are far apart. The most brilliant editorial cut in Restless Blood is when we jump from Sylvi consulting with her doctor in Switzerland to an image of her sister and husband lying on a beach, wearing the same type of round dark glasses. That reminds us, while we’re on the subject, that Tulio’s films all seem to love beach scenes, with swimming a continual signifier of hanky-panky.
Teuvo Tulio’s Fantastic Artifice in Sensuela
If Tuevo Tulio’s previous independently produced films pushed as much as they could against what Finnish censorship allowed, his gaudily colored remake of Cross of Love, now called Sensuela (1973), takes full advantage of the permissive 1970s to present what’s virtually a softcore exploitation film. Also, it’s full metal bonkers from the opening moments.
While Bach and Chopin were mascots of the 1946 epics, Sensuela is wall-to-wall Tchaikovsky, beginning with opening shots of flying over mountains. Wait, it’s actually some kind of backdrop of mountains.
To the sound of little pop-gun effects, we get shots of a young man who looks like a wax mannequin in a Nazi uniform holding a steering wheel and gazing calmly about him as though in a plexiglass diorama with a broken, bullet-riddled screen. It’s the most artificial and unconvincing idea of an airplane pilot this side of a high school play, and we’ll get more of this as we catch glimpses of his dead comrades in alleged other parts of the plane, decorated with blood in photo-novel still shots.
This resolutely fantastic artifice will continue throughout Sensuela. It’s less a budget decision than an artistic conception, something about the phoniness of the world and the people in it. Sometimes people stand against abstract backgrounds, looking offscreen.
When our pilot lands among Sammi Laplanders in colorful blue and red costumes by their goahtis, we get an extended scene of them castrating reindeer with their teeth. Amid documentary footage of reindeer and shots of two actors wrestling with a real animal, we get footage of a phony animal head, as it might be over a mantel, rocking to and fro while someone moans for effect. We’ll have similar taxidermies and howls for wolves.
Since Sensuela is a remake of Cross of Love, we now have a Lapp girl, Laila (Marianne Mardi), who instantly “fell in love as only a child of nature can”, says the narrator who’d just been showing us a map of the area and pointing out villages with a pen. Her growling father (Ossi Elstelä) is the possessive one whose wife dumped him long ago for reasons we can well imagine.
As in Restless Blood, young Hans (Mauritz Akerman), who persistently looks like a wax dummy, sweeps the innocent lass to the city with tender words and then shows his true stripes. He throws parties with topless women dancing and sex in various rooms, which is fine except that he’s losing interest in Laila.
She sallies forth to work in various jobs, shares a flat with a prostitute (Maria Pertamo), and meets a nominally nicer boy (Ismo Saario). They endlessly flagellate themselves with shrubs in a sauna.
Sensuela‘s story takes several more turns than in Cross of Love. Laila is a stronger, more self-possessed heroine, and she takes opportunities to articulate her feminist anger at social double-binds. She sometimes delivers these thoughts straight at the camera, as when Maureen O’Hara’s character berates the male audience in Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), expressing contempt for those who pay to look at her. In both Cross of Love and Sensuela, the heroine’s thwarted relations with her angry, possessive, conservative father are central to her rebellion and punishment.
The presence of a Nazi soldier who later becomes a Helsinki swinger with his own photography studio, like David Hemmings’ character in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), is an interesting and potentially provocative comment on Finland’s brief alliance with Nazi Germany against the Soviets before a political reversal. The Lapps are confused by the news that a friend one day may be an enemy the next, and Hans’ assimilation into postwar Finland becomes its own commentary. This detail may have confused and annoyed many viewers in 1973.
In any event, Sensuela was a critical and commercial floperoo that remained buried until Tuevo Tulio’s death in 2000. Now, viewers look upon it as an example of the personal vision of a singular filmmaker, an independent outsider expressing himself through camp excess.
The story’s not the thing. Aside from the nudity, the film unrolls its bizarre foregrounded anti-realism in every colorful frame, daring the viewer to take it seriously. We want to laugh, and sometimes we do, but something real is happening under the lavish artifice.
The 1946 black-and-white restorations contain mild artifacts and signs of decay that don’t seriously distract from the viewer’s absorption. Sensuela is eye-popping. Bonuses include remaining fragments of two otherwise lost films of Tulio and Linnanheimo. We also get a critical comparison of the two versions of Pushkin’s story and a brief profile of the Sammi people and their role in WWII.
For lagniappe, the package of three Blu-rays throws in two unrelated educational shorts from 1946-47. One is a morality lesson to young women about getting drunk at parties. The other celebrates children’s nurseries run by the Christmas Seals organization; buy yours in the lobby today. 3 x Tuevo Tulio is issued in a limited edition slipcase with a booklet of useful essays discussing Tulio’s career and cross-indexing his themes with those of other filmmakers.