"Stories of what I see" - Happy, Coming Up, Act 2
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What the Swedish filmmakers exposed...
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sweden had a bit of a production line going in sexually frank films, be they sex education documentaries, Mondo films, saucy comedies or sexploitation dramas. A number of these were imported into British cinemas and made a considerable amount of money, and an argument could be made that they had a part to play in shaping the sexual mores which developed in this country; they certainly are mostly of a higher quality than most of the comic sex romps which British film companies were churning out at the time. Klubb Super 8 are a contemporary Swedish film archive and distributor which specialises in preserving and releasing the films from this era on DVD. They had a short season of films on at the ICA in London last year (which I missed) but have got together with Revelation to release three of them on a handy triple DVD set, valuable for social and film historians and lovers of exploitation and non-Hollywood cinema in English speaking territories. Christina Lindberg's Swedish Erotica Collection 1 is the package, and the first film in the set is the notorious sex education documentary The Language of Love.
The Language of Love is real curiosity from the vaults, a late 60s Swedish sex education film which became an enormous box office hit across Europe and even, when it was finally released uncut with an X certificate in the UK in 1973 (it was initially refused a certificate); this is historically interesting, as The Language of Love features some sections of actual hardcore footage, with close ups of fingers masturbating vaginas and a penis penetrating one. The film is apparently meant as a serious attempt to allay people's fears and misconceptions about sex & improve the sex lives of heterosexual couples, but undoubtedly the enormous box office success of the film was due to the prurient interest of the public.
It is hard to image people actually sitting in a cinema and watching the film. The bulk of the footage has four "sexperts" (sex therapists plus a gynaecologist) sitting around in a living room, swilling gallons of tea & coffee and talking earnestly about sex. I don't know about the time of the film's release, but these days the sexperts chat is unintentionally hilarious, as the foursome are humourless, po-faced and rather brusque in their talk (as well as being an extremely plain verging on ugly bunch).
Inter-cut with this mirth-producing talk are mockumentary scenes ( purporting to illustrate the findings of famous sex researchers Masters and Johnson) in which couples talk about and do the sex thing. Here the film falls even further into risibility, as although these couples are meant to represent (or actually be) real people, they are do one-dimensional, robotic and mono-subject orientated that they seem like no one anyone has even met in this world, rather being dead ringers for the inhabitants of some future Brave New World-type dystopia. The most striking moment comes when the most focused-upon couple, who've previously experienced sexual problems, talk to each other after a bout of now satisfying sex and tell each other that they are now "no longer playing a role" - but two less real people you'll have trouble finding in the history of the cinema…
The final third of the film is mostly taken up with the gynaecologist going about his business, inserting diaphragms, coils and caps into various young women or advising them to go onto the pill. This is followed by a completely unnecessary montage of shots showing a red-light district, pages from lurid pornographic magazines and couples walking around lewdly - all supposedly to illustrate what's wrong with society's prurient attitude to sex but edited and scored in such a way as to encourage an adolescent and voyeuristic attitude.
The film is poorly shot and goes on for too long, yet it gets extra stars for its camp value today. There's also a saccharine and quite repulsive score by Benny and Bjorn pre-ABBA. This is, btw, the film which Travis Bickle takes Betsy to see in Taxi Driver; the fact that she was offended instead of sitting there laughing her head off shows how unsuitable, po-faced and hung-up a date she was! The Language of Love is little more now than a historical document, and a testament to how self-deluding the experts in pseudo-sciences can get as they pretend to serious encouragement of a healthy loving sex life whilst adding to the creation of a culture of voyeurism and conformity.
The other two films feature both in the lead role the extraordinary Christina Lindberg, best known through being celebrated by Quentin Tarantino for her performance as the one-eyed rape victim and avenging angel in Thriller - A Cruel Picture, which is itself a mixture of sexploitation, violence and hardcore inserts well worth tracking down to be gobsmacked by. Lindberg has a curiously elusive quality and a strange, affectless way of performing - negatively, you could say that she walks through her films but it is perhaps better to say that she haunts them, playing variations on the theme of living death as she does.
The title character in Anita - Swedish Nymphet is a nubile sixteen year old girl living in a bleak industrial town somewhere in the wilds of Sweden. She has a problem, in that her reputation in the town is at an all-time low due to the fact that she insists on propositioning every man she meets - young or old, mostly ugly - and then giving them a blow job and sometimes more. The local girls call her a "slut", the local lads rough her up and her parents dismiss her in favour of her swat of a younger sister. Eventually Anita runs away to Stockholm (nobody misses her) and is lucky enough to hook up with a cute and well-mannered young man who not only falls in love with her but also understands that she's a textbook example of a nymphomaniac (him having access to the textbooks as he is a psychology student). The young man falls in love with Anita and eventually they get together, once Anita has been cured of her nymphomania by having an orgasm with a lesbian lover. Hold on, the plot goes a bit mad at the end there, doesn't it? Anita the film is as schizoid as its protagonist. It comes on like a particularly bleak version social realist cinema, all grimy interiors and ruined or soulless exteriors and does go some way to suggesting that Anita's sexual compulsiveness is an outcome of a particularly loveless family life (a la Ken Loach's film of the same name) in the context of a meaningless consumer society of shopping malls and urban development. Yet at the same time, the film voyeuristically finds excuse after excuse for getting the gorgeous Lindberg naked at every opportunity. It is as if the film is itself suffering from the same compulsion as its heroine, and what's more it expects its audience to be suffering from the same malady.
In the final third, the film loses all pretence to realism, with the completely gratuitous soft-core lesbian footage and an equally unnecessary trip to a strip joint, where Anita supports a saucy dancer in her routine. Logic is thrown completely out of the window, as Anita's completely unbelievable "cure" leads to her settling down to a life of doe-eyed monogamous bliss with her psychiatric student now boyfriend, ending in a church where the organ player notices them canoodling and so strikes up one of those jaunty & jolly tunes that we expect to find at the close of one of the late 60s Carry On films.
Anita - Swedish Nymphet is certainly not a film which has anything much constructive to say on the subject of sexual compulsion (although its portrait of the malady in the first hour is convincing enough); instead, it's rather more intriguing as a symptom of the sexual compulsion of the society which made it and watched it: like the men accosted by Anita, the makers and viewers of the film may be made uncomfortable by her excesses but they aren't saying "no" to taking part in them themselves, compulsively.
The third film in the set, Exposed, is the best, despite (or because of?) having previously been "banned in 36 countries" (according to the Swedish Erotica box). Lena, a nubile young lass, has been seeing an older man behind the back of her young boyfriend Jan. When she tells Jan, he rewards her with a good few smacks around the chops and she flees town. Lena hitches a lift with a middle-aged businessman, who parks down a side road and rapes her. But this turns out to be an idle fantasy of Lena's, and when the man drops her off she is picked up by a male/female couple of swingers who she takes to her boyfriend's mother's cabin in the woods. The three of them share an idyll there, broken only by another fantasy of Lena's that the woman is murderously jealous of her, and late at night she watches them making love on the living room floor.
The next day Jan appears and, after a car chase (which ends with a fantasy from Lena that she & the couple crash and burn to death), Jan drags his errant girlfriend back to the town. There she confesses that the older man, Helge, has been blackmailing her into taking part in orgies because he has some nudie pictures of her. Helge is violent and obsessed with Lena, and the middle section of the film is split between the girl getting lovey-dovey with Jan and being stalked by the menacing Helge. Eventually Lena runs away from Jan when his mother discovers the nudie shots (calling her a whore) & is followed home by the stalking Helge. He gets into the house and, in a particularly creepy and uncomfortable scene, ties her to the bed (with her collusion), cuts off her dress and has sex with her. She gets an arm free and uses the knife to stab her lover/assailant in the back. There follows an extraordinary shot in which she remains tied up (by both hands) with his stabbed corpse lying on top of her. The next day, Lena's mother arrives back from holiday. Helge has gone and Lena is taken shopping for a new dress. She meets Jan and all seems okay, but for the fact that Lena is still thinking about seeing Helge. There is some question by now as to whether Helge actually exists or whether he's another fantasy of Lena's.
Exposed is intriguing because it suggests that Lena's sexuality is a complex and messy state of affairs, that there is no longer the surety that she would prefer to be in a "normal" relationship with a bland ordinary bloke - perhaps her sexual life runs to more exotic and dangerous pursuits? Or perhaps Helge is a fantasy of the predatory male gaze which will always follow her, thinking about coercion, submission and violence? There's no ground for the definite to exist in Lena's life, torn as she is between a bland reality and a sadistic world of fantasy which is itself potentially true.
Lena's story (like Anita's) takes place in nicely furnished but faceless rooms (sometimes when Lena is alone in her bedroom, the visuals are reminiscent of Munch) or what Deleuze in his Cinema books calls "any-space-whatevers": shopping precincts, streets, petrol stations and stairwells. This is a world which is meaningless but for a series of impulses, be they normalising or sexually deviant. Lena has no definite self, she is a series of reactions or acquiescences to the desires of the men in her life, which might or might not be her desires. In the end, though a lot of flesh has been exposed in the film, the self is as opaque as it was before any camera was pointed at it; or perhaps that ambiguous process which goes by the name of Lena IS the self as impulse and flux.
Christina Lindberg's affectless face has rarely been better used than in the role of the central void of person, Lena. The character confesses that "I feel too little and know too much" and in the world of experience that the film exposes, Lena is not alone in her lack of feeling: as she and her mother walk as typical consumers along the commercial streets of the town, they pass a sex-shop district with windows displaying the same kind of pictures that Lena might have posed for; she asks her mother what she thinks of them, and the mother replies "soon everything will be like that; nobody will feel anything any more." In its modest way, Exposed is a prophecy of a world which was, as the sexual revolution ended, just being born: a world of impulse and craving, the vain search for satisfaction, boring conformism or soulless promiscuity and kicks.
Scored with a haunting, harmonica-led theme tune and filmed in stark realist colours, Exposed deserves to have a higher reputation, and is the major reason for picking up the Swedish Erotica DVD set. The set is billed as "Collection 1" and I hope that there's more of these fascinating lost gems going to be coming our way soon.