These three films by Mai Zetterling are visually sumptuous and thematically trenchant.
Adapted from a 1933 novel by Agnes von Krusenstjerna (whose life Zetterling would later chronicle in Amorosa), 1964’s Loving Couples is set on the eve of World War I and empathetically examines the lives of three very different women. We first encounter aristocratic Angela van Pahlen (Gio Petré), shopgirl-cum-artist’s model Agda (Harriet Andersson), and the van Pahlen family servant, Adele (Gunnel Lindblom), amid the coldly clinical confines of a maternity ward. The film then weaves a complex associative web between past and present, periodically flashing back in time to elaborate on formative experiences in the women’s lives. Events culminate in a lengthy sequence that unfolds over the course of a Midsummer’s Eve celebration, bringing all three together in some rather decisive ways.
The title of Loving Couples has to be taken somewhat ironically, given Zetterling’s unsparing portrayal of sexual abuse, chronic infidelity, and casual cruelty between the sexes. Even her depiction of the hospital where the women are supposedly being cared for is unstinting: The presiding obstetrician (Gunnar Björnstrand) is haughty and dismissively paternalistic, and his views of women are decidedly retrograde. The almost offhand way a nurse tosses a stillborn fetus into a waiting bucket is truly disturbing. And, in a moment not often glimpsed in narrative films, Zetterling goes so far as to include footage of an actual childbirth.
The film gives you the impression that Swedish society and its institutions are impervious to alteration. You get the idea that not even the looming chaos of WWI will do anything to shift the entrenched attitudes of the landed classes. As though to compensate for such willful intransigence, the film exhibits a refreshingly sympathetic attitude toward social outsiders, including several gay and lesbian characters, like Angela’s lovelorn finishing school friend (Lissi Alandh), who drives herself sick with unrequited desire. Still, the film refuses to let any of its characters off the hook for their own actions, ending on a haunting freeze frame that either betokens a vision of maternal fulfilment, or else a foretaste of hell itself.
Night Games, from 1966, explores a fraught mother-son dynamic from the son’s point of view. The film opens when the disaffected scion of a wealthy family, Jan (Keve Hjelm), brings his fiancée (Lena Brundin) home to visit his childhood home. Night Games plays like a tantalizingly artful take on the ghost story: The tenantless rooms and empty corridors of the castle appear as if haunted by Jan’s memories of his dead mother, Irene (Ingrid Thulin), who both fascinates the young Jan (Jörgen Lindström) and repels his timorous advances. Their barbed relationship is perhaps best epitomized in the scene where Irene reads Jan a bedtime story, only it’s a fairly erotic passage from the Song of Solomon, to which Jan begins to masturbate. Not surprisingly, Irene’s response to Jan’s burgeoning sexuality is anything but body positive.
While Night Games works best as an astringent psychodrama of the Strindbergian sort, it also functions as a barbed social critique that excoriates the superficial and materialistic values of contemporary Sweden. In that sense, Jan’s castle—with its apparently endless proliferation of priceless artworks and antique gimcracks—can stand in for the entire nation. In the film’s almost Buñuelian finale, Jan announces to a gathering of posh party guests that he’s about to blow up the building, leading them to hastily loot and pillage its contents, all while an ensemble of chamber musicians mangle the Swedish national anthem. True liberation, the film seems to suggest, only comes once you’ve utterly demolished the past.
Easily Zetterling’s most overtly political film, 1968’s The Girls goes meta by gradually blurring the lines between a theatrical troupe’s production of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata and the private lives of its three leads (Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, and Gunnel Lindblom). While her earlier films cannily shuffled their time frames, The Girls repeatedly shifts registers between fantasy and reality until it’s virtually impossible to tell the difference, which constitutes a more open embrace of the Felliniesque surrealism found in parts of Night Games.
The Girls trenchantly demonstrates the seriocomic repercussions that result when the titular trio carry the battle of the sexes portrayed in the ancient Greek play into their personal lives. As their initially small-scale revolt widens, the film puts into question both the degree and kind of effect a work of politically minded art can have on society at large. The film’s ambivalent rejoinder is the eerily distorted vision of society’s upper crust seen in a funhouse mirror. This carnivalesque image of the world turned upside down provides an excellent metaphor for Mai Zetterling’s unconventional, often uncompromising films.
The Criterion Collection offers these three films—with their lustrous monochrome cinematography by Sven Nykvist and Rune Ericson—in gorgeous 2K digital restorations. The transfers boast uniformly high bitrates, excellent contrast, clean and clear details of costume and décor, as well as deep and uncrushed black levels. The Swedish lossless PCM mono track sounds fine, with no discernible hiss or crackle, and creditably conveys the scores from composers Roger Wallis and Michael Hurd. (Night Games has no credited composer.)
Criterion has assembled an excellent roster of bonus materials. An interview with TCM host and author Alicia Malone covers the broad strokes of Mai Zetterling’s life and career in admirable fashion. Zetterling appears in both a 1984 interview and a documentary from 1989 to provide her own idiosyncratic take on her work as an actress and filmmaker. The latter also includes talking-head contributions from several cast members, as well as ex-husband and frequent co-writer David Hughes. Filmed in Zetterling’s house in the South of France two years after her death in 1994, Lines from the Heart reunites the three leads from The Girls to reminiscence about Zetterling, their approach to their craft, and making major life choices. Lastly, the enclosed booklet contains a thoroughgoing essay from critic Mariah Larsson.
Presented in an impressive three-disc set from Criterion, these three films by Mai Zetterling are visually sumptuous and thematically trenchant.