The Cross of Love

This expressionistic, lurid melodrama is one of Tulio’s best-known films. A lighthouse keeper’s daughter is seduced by a stranger washed up on their shore. Soon she’s left home for the city with little idea of the hardships that await her. It’s easy to see how this film influenced Fassbinder so deeply, with its compassionate and yet cruelly objective study of a woman, betrayed by her lover into a life of prostitution. The gorgeous abstract lighting, crazed sets and titular Cross of Love make this one of Tulios most visually ravishing films.

Tulio is a Finnish national treasure but his films remain tragically unknown in the UK. The Cross of Love is one of four of his seminal works restored by the Finnish National Archive and screening in our Teuvo season. Specialising in the much-maligned genre of Melodrama and heavily influenced by Cukor, Lubitsch and Von Sternberg, his spectacular depictions of suffering and sex cast a deep shadow into the works of subsequent directors such as Aki Kaurismäki and Guy Maddin. As Finnish scholar Anu Koivunen explains, "Tulio was both an idealist and a producer of cheap films" which are at once cries for justice and hugely entertaining epics.