‘Here I am, just the way you wanted me’, the prostitute named Gazelle remarks with a hefty dose of cynicism in her voice to the man who once loved and then abandoned her. The film in question is The Song of the Scarlet Flower, which Teuvo Tulio directed in 1938. The film is based on a novel of the same name by Johannes Linnankoski, but the quoted line does not appear in the book. Six years later, a film titled The Way You Wanted Me (1944) premiered. It, too, tells the story of an innocent woman who succumbs to prostitution. She is Maija, a young woman grown up in a small island community. Her lover abandons her after she becomes pregnant, which leads her to look for customers in a port tavern. One night in the tavern she meets her former lover and with bitter irony repeats Gazelle's line from the earlier film, which now also serves as the title of this film. Tulio used the phrase once more in his last film, Sensuela, which premiered in 1973. Over thirty years had passed, but Sensuela tells the same old story: a young and innocent woman, this time from the Sami community, falls in love, is abandoned and has to prostitute herself to make ends meet. Encountering her former lover in the Reeperbahn district in Hamburg, she too says to him contemptuously, ‘Here I am, just the way you wanted me.’ Throughout his career Tulio depicted men who fall in love with virgins and, without thinking about the consequences of their desire-driven romancing, turn them into prostitutes. The repeated line is a key topos in Tulio's oeuvre; it is a feminist admonition aimed at eliciting self-disgust in the men.

Repetition was a fundamental component of Tulio's authorship. A degree of repetition is ‘a common and multiform phenomenon in cinema and in art in general’. In classical cinema, ‘the principle of repetition and regulated difference […] is the basis of narrative progression and expansion’. It serves that purpose in Tulio's cinema as well, but as the above example indicates, one rather unique aspect of his art is repetition in an excessive and conspicuous form.