(Rakkauden risti). “Now, don’t be afraid if your husband comes to your bed,” the old lighthouse keeper Kalle awkwardly counsels his newly married daughter, Riita (Regina Linnanheimo). Little does he know that Riita has seen it all, and then some. Tulio adapted a Pushkin story to his own ends in The Cross of Love. Opening with a visually dramatic tempest surrounding the lighthouse where Kalle lives with a mocking English-speaking parrot (“all right, all right, all right”), the film moves to the city with Riita and the amorous if amoral gentleman who washes up their way. Once there, she follows the usual Tulio pattern into prostitution, with a sideline as an artist’s model: Riita, draped upon the eponymous cross, is the film’s central image. Moving, as melodrama is wont, from the sublime to the absurd, even employing a sound stage to the point of abstraction, Cross of Love looks forward to the German filmmakers of the 1970s like Fassbinder and Werner Schroeter, who took apart the cross of melodrama even as they knelt before it.

—Judy Bloch

• Written by Nisse Hirn, loosely based on Alexander Pushkin’s The Stationmaster. Photographed by Pentti Lintonen, Uno Pihlström. With Regina Linnanheimo, Oscar Tengström, Ville Salminen, Rauli Tuomi. (99 mins, In Finnish with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm)