The Wonderfully Strange & Surreal Melodramas of Finnish director Teuvo Tulio 3-DISC SET COMING THIS FALL

SENSUELA + CROSS OF LOVE + RESTLESS BLOOD:

The Wonderfully Strange & Surreal Melodramas of Finnish director Teuvo Tulio

3-DISC SET COMING THIS FALL

A mad, dreamlike combination of surrealist imagery and unhinged emotional intensity, the films of Finnish director Teuvo Tulio (1912-2000) are melodramas untethered from any sense of naturalism or narrative logic (or often good taste), operating in the same glorious, hallucinatory space as the subversive, Brechtian melodramas of Douglas Sirk and R.W. Fassbinder.  They are, in a word, wildly entertaining -- and also just plain wild:  unearthly and operatic and totally addictive, streaked with film noir and near-Expressionist horror tropes, and doused with tears and booze, prostitution and poison.  To quote Anna Bak-Kvapil in an essay for MUBI in 2009, Tulio’s films are “spectacles of suffering and sex … Tulio is obsessed with his actresses, and ecstatic close-ups are his forte. A tear flecked face, a concentrated expression of near orgasmic pain or pleasure -- he enables actresses to express their euphoria and anguish in the most beautiful of ways.”

Born in Latvia as Theodor Antonius Tugai to a Turkish-Polish father and a Persian-Latvian mother, Tulio moved to Finland when he was 10.  Initially working as an actor in silent cinema, he moved behind the camera in the mid-1930s and changed his name, often collaborating with his lifelong companion, the remarkable actress Regina Linnanheimo (1915-1995) who starred in and co-wrote scripts for a number of their films.  Following the disastrous reception to his last feature, the astonishing reindeer herding / Mod melodrama SENSUELA in 1973, Tulio retired from directing.  His work has thankfully been rediscovered and preserved in recent years including these 3 gorgeous new restorations from KAVI – the National Audiovisual Institute of Finland, for their first-ever worldwide Blu-ray release from Deaf Crocodile.

THE CROSS OF LOVE (1946)

CROSS OF LOVE (RAKKAUDEN RISTI) – 1946, 99 min.  Crazed, grizzled old lighthouse keeper Majakka-Kalle (Oscar Tengström) spends his nights talking to his parrot, cat and dog, surrounded by deep German Expressionist shadows and howling winds.  There are clearly deeper shadows in his mind:  when he hears a drowning man outside on the rocks, he grabs his rifle and shoots him!  We soon learn why he hates strangers, as he reveals in flashback the story of his daughter Riitta (Regina Linnanheimo) who saves the life of half-drowned Mauri (actor and later director Ville Salminen).  Riitta is soon swept off to the city by the rakishly handsome Mauri and falls prey to his advances (he basically rapes her) – and in no time she’s a boozy, cigarette-smoking prostitute with a black beret and jaded wink.  Back in the lighthouse, her father crushes dried flowers on her photo while the parrot incessantly cackles behind him.  She’s followed one day by a sensitive young man Henrik (Rauli Tuomi) who turns out to be a painter, and wants her to model – DEAR GOD – half-naked, tied to a cross with her dress torn open.  Unfrickin-believable!  The erotic image of Riitta on the cross, bare-breasted, is of course the perfect metaphor for the mix of the profane and sacred in all of Tulio’s films.  Fueled by an absolutely riveting performance by sad-eyed, Lizabeth Scott lookalike Regina Linnanheimo; her onscreen lover Tuomi was married to Linnanheimo’s actress sister Rakel until his death from suicide in 1949 shortly after this was made, adding another strange layer of intensity to the movie.  Adapted from an Aleksandr Pushkin story “The Stationmaster” and later remade by Tulio as SENSUELA in 1973 – although the films are wildly different in tone and style, and both incredibly entertaining.  In Finnish with English subtitles.

“So it is in the gestalt that Tulio captures your attention. In an almost hallucinatory jump universe akin to wild dreams. What the surrealists were doing 20 years before in fashioning narratives by stringing disparate scenes into dreams of oneiric fantasy.” – Tony D’Ambra, FilmsNoir.net

RESTLESS BLOOD (1946)

RESTLESS BLOOD (LEVOTON VERI) – 1946, 100 min.  Blonde wife Sylvi (Regina Linnanheimo) seems to have an ideal marriage to playboy doctor husband Valter (Bela Lugosi lookalike Eino Katajavuori), despite her kid sister’s schoolgirl obsession with him – until her young son is killed by a speeding bus while she’s out shopping one day.  She drinks poison in desperation – she survives but loses her sight.  Kid sister Outi returns – and now the grieving husband is more than a little interested in her.  Look out:  once Sylvi downs a shot of poison and dons her weird black shades, ooowee!!  Increasingly insane melodrama ensues as Sylvi, who eventually and miraculously regains her sight, continues to pretend to be blind to torment herself watching her kid sister and husband fall in love, while they think she can’t see them canoodle.  Great, intensely deranged performance by Linnanheimo in immaculately tailored suits and 1940s hairdos, sporting Peter Lorre-in-MAD LOVE black shades and giving the whole film a German Expressionist / neo-horror / neo-noir vibe.   In Finnish with English subtitles.

SENSUELA (1973)

SENSUELA (1973, 104 min.)  A very loose remake of Tulio’s earlier CROSS OF LOVE (1946), his notorious last film – and arguably his greatest achievement – SENSUELA opens on colorfully-attired reindeer herder’s daughter Laila (Marianne Mardi) saving badly-wounded German WW2 pilot Hans (Mauritz Åkerman in apparently his only film role) after his plane crashes.  Hans quickly seduces Laila from the frozen tundra off to the big city, where she descends into a glorious polyester maelstrom of fabulous clothes and nudie photography and hippie orgies.  (Oh, the action and characters mysteriously leap forward 25 years to the Swinging 60s without seeming to age a day -- don’t ask us why! Just go with it!).  What follows is a truly incredible mixture of ethnographic Lappish reindeer herding docudrama, jawdropping John Waters-meets-Doug Sirk-meets Russ Meyer-meets-Anna Biller’s THE LOVE WITCH-style melodrama blending eye-popping Technicolor, softcore eroticism / sexploitation, and Mod 60’s / 70s Pop Art fashions and décor.  SENSUELA seems to have been beamed in from an alternate universe where any standards of good taste are completely inverted and/or missing.  It’s easily the craziest reindeer herding / Mod melodrama with tons of casual nudity ever to come out of Finland or anywhere.  The film also has the strangely stilted feel of early 70s industrials:  everything awkwardly posed, very artificial in a Brechtian way, with products -- bright red coffee pots, stuffed toys, Viking ship lines, artwork, furniture -- too-prominently displayed.  Like all of Tulio’s films, SENSUELA is riotously entertaining but also incredibly subversive in its blunt, “artless” presentation of the allure of consumerism and sexual freedom.  In Finnish with English subtitles. Note:  SENSUELA is intended for mature audiences and contains frequent onscreen nudity.