A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Sunday, September 21, 2025

Loving Couples (Mai Zetterling, 1964)

Harriet Andersson, Gio Petré, and Gunnel Lindblom in Loving Couples

Cast: Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, Gio Petré, Anita Björk, Gunnar Björnstrand, Eva Dahlbeck, Jan Malmsjö, Lissi Alandh, Bengt Brunskog, Anja Boman, Åke Grönberg. Heinz Hopf. Screenplay: Mai Zetterling, David Hughes, based on a novel by Agnes von Krusentjerna. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Production design: Jan Boleslaw. Film editing: Paul Davies. Music: Roger Wallis. 

Mail Zetterling's first film as director, Loving Couples, almost collapses under the weight of exposition and subtext. It centers on three women about to give birth in a gloomy Swedish hospital in the first year of World War I. One of the women, Angela (Gio Petré), is unwed but doesn't care; another, Agda (Harriet Andersson), is married to a gay man who isn't the father, and is perfectly happy about it; the third, Adele (Gunnel Lindblom), is told that the child she's carrying, fathered by her husband, whom she doesn't love, is dead. All of them wound up in this condition on or about Midsummer's Eve on an opulent estate. The film first wanders back through their several girlhoods and then spends a good deal of time bringing us up to the day they were impregnated. The tone of the film ranges from giddy to gloomy as it explores religious bigotry, sexual freedom, societal hypocrisy, mindless militarism, and predatory behavior, among other topics. It almost flies apart at several of its narrative turns, but somehow Zetterling manages to hold it together. 

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