User Reviews

This ancient Finnish drama is a lost little gem. The direction is a bit sloppy, but quite ambitious, starting with the expressionist overtones (weird angling in location, glitter and blur idyll, menacingly lit theatric face close-ups etc), and without forgetting the iconoclast imagery (the cross of love painting). Actually, it predates trends that would surface in, say, Fassbinder's work. Complementing the visual side, the film explores a number of interesting themes, starting with the father's oppression towards the daughter, the lure of money and the big city, the sleaze of the demi-monde, the feebleness to avoid succumbing to destiny etc. Actually you could say that it works as a kind of metaphor: the father's oppression causes the daughter to mythologize aspects of life (an ideal love, a Cinderella framework); when unavoidably her life comes at odds with the mythology, she becomes a crucified martyr for a world unable to cope with it's own desires.

WOW! This should be an archetypal 'cult' film being as it is about, and so does depict, woman in bondage! Crucified (pose) to be precise!

How so, could get away with that as entertainment in from a post wartime film? Well as the lead actor (Rauli Toimi), as a painter, enlightens posing just marginally nude lead actress* Regina, literally strung up, arms akimbo, on a cross (* for that you'll need to source in the original Finnish with one breast exposed version – as not in the 'twin' Swedish version, that tastefully censored to be draped over for that one!)

So as his dabs his brush to the easel, he explains: "The cross of love; do you know what that is? It's a story about a sinful, fallen woman and her pure love. Two thousand years ago there lived in the Roman Empire a patriarch who fell in love with a beautiful slave girl and made her his lover. After a while, he grew tired of her and drove her away. She became a prostitute. Then one day, the patriarch's own son met the same woman and they fell in love. On hearing about the son's love for a common prostitute, the father had the girl captured – locked up and see

-( change of shot to Regina in such crucified position, head lolling on her chest)-

had her crucified like all the villains at that time. Crucified for her pure love. And the son? He forsook his lover – for she was only a woman of the street."

Ohh! There you go: perfidious men! That's what this film is about: (there's more; go see the quotes sidebar, for straight thereafter, so overcome with (literal?) passion for her, he immediately downs his brush to run over to declare his consummate love for her as she looms above him still in arms up crucified agony (or, really, pose strain) …. And just incidentally, so what does that infer about those Finn post war men's turn-ons, then?!)

But Tulio the director, inspired by the great Russian writer Pushkin - "Stantsionnij Smortritelj" - in a version of 'the Postman's daughter', but here, starting out oh so innocently as a lighthouse-keeper's daughter, she has earlier been enticed away by a shipwreck survivor after she anyway ministers to him to recovery, he then soon to be smitten after having lecherously espied her naked dash into the sea (and full frontal back out, too, in the Finnish version; but not the 'twin' Swedish one - which sorta dulls the reason for his sudden lustfulness!) But as Tulio warns, he's a good for nothing, only wants one thing, - you can tell, coz in his swanky home, she in his 'spare' pjs, bouncing on his bed, he grabs same choccies to seductively share with her - close up on, one has a butterfly on its wrapper, the other – a spider!! Ohh; what's it all symbolise? Well, whatever, so soon, she's out on the big city's sinful streets!

For in another of his 'women's' films, ergo really about women beware of the betrayal and perfidy of hypocritical men with the women they profess to love 'no matter what', but who then do indeed precisely so betray them (father's included!), delivered in another of his torrid love affair ways, characteristically (almost literally) eye poppingly so through his regular leading lady, Regina Linnanhemo, and with some of the best scene chewing hokey (but genuine and heartfelt meant) dialogue ever (of Nisse Hirn?), love and betrayal scenes: you just gotta stay to the 'bitter's end' to hear the hypocritical lovelorn 'hero's tirade against misused Regina as 'whore' - yet who earlier he'd anyway met 'on the street', yet soon still professed his undying love to (yep, no matter what.) Hypocritical perfidy embodied, indeed.

This is stupendous warning polemic twaddle – in the vein / genre of those ten year earlier Stateside thirties warning films like 'Child Bride', 'Joyless Street' and all those anti drug / marijuana types, 'Reefer Madness' and the likes, but here in far, far better style, this polemic is about those bad men of the post war period who you just couldn't trust a jot how far you could throw 'em. Beasts! (Crucify 'em all!)