As Paolo Cherchi Usai has perceptively stated, Teuvo Tulio makes ‘Douglas Sirk look like Robert Bresson’. In its sheer excessiveness, Tulio's brand of melodrama transcends not only other examples of this genre in Finnish cinema, but almost any other related tradition. In particular, his style utterly contravenes the national stereotype of Finns as withdrawn when it comes to emotional expression. His characters are consumed by barely, if at all, contained passions which again and again lead them to erratic, destructive behaviour. He further expanded the range of melodrama, that most transnational of genres, with his stories about obsessed characters. He developed a highly idiosyncratic style with the purpose of giving maximal emotional impact to the contorted plot twists of his films. All this makes Tulio worthy of attention even in terms of world cinema.

FROM TUGAI TO TULIO

It is difficult to trace a suitable critical attitude to Tulio's aesthetics. Having studied Tulio's films closely, we cannot quite agree with Markku Varjola, who writes: ‘Tulio is able to elevate his cheap and ridiculous stories expressively to the level of archetypes, where their greatness becomes crystal clear.’ It would seem rather that Tulio was possessed by certain archetypes to the extent that they increasingly took over his storytelling, sometimes even reversing the pattern Varjola proposes. Tulio turns Alexandr Pushkin's sensitive and touching short story Stationmaster (1831) into the moralistic extravagance of Cross of Love (Rakkauden risti, 1946) and later on to that masterpiece of camp, Sensuela (1973), because he was possessed by the schemas of exploitation and lost innocence, which do not really appear in the original story. This is not an instance ofmodernisation, almost the contrary. From archetypes gone mad there emerges a surreally excessive, strangely anachronistic melodrama, way beyond its ‘best before’ date. On the surface it seems to hark back to what in a British context would be called Victorian morality, but in its extremity it goes far beyond even that. Judging simply by the films – as we lack substantial biographical support – we could assume that Tulio's art emerges to a great extent from a collapse of the distinction between a genuine sense of morality and the destructive power of moralism.