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Monthly archives: April 2010

The Last Days

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We’re coming up against the last few days of the Swedish film weeks at Lincoln Center. The much anticipated The Girl Who Played with Fire will close the program on Wednesday May 4. I would tell you to see it, but tickets sold out two weeks ago.

Another screening not to be missed is the selection of New Shorts this Friday, April 30 at 5.30 pm. It includes Stig Björkman’s Images from the Playground, a portrait of Ingmar Bergman that includes clips from Bergman’s own home movies. Jonas Odell’s Lies is another highlight.

There are also some truly amazing Swedish classics scheduled: These include A Swedish Love Story, Roy Andersson’s beautiful and tender film of two teenagers in love (and a great portrait of teenage Stockholm in 1969) which will play on Friday, April 30 at 9.15 pm, as well as yet another screening of I Am Curious (Yellow) on Friday at 7.20 pm.

Kay Pollack’s social realist Children’s Island (Friday 3.15 pm and Sunday 5.40 pm) as well as Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (Sunday 8 pm and Tuesday 1 pm) also deserve special mention.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg

April 29, 2010

One Summer of Happiness & Miss Julie

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One particularly clever instance of programming was the combination of Monday’s screenings of One Summer of Happiness and Miss Julie. Both are tales at the intersection of class and sex, and the consequences of radical social change barreling in among the unprepared.

One Summer of Happiness (1951) was a landmark moment in Swedish cinema. In part due to a skinny-dip scene and an implied post-swim roll in the meadow. The film pits the new age of sexual freedom against the strong Lutheran streak in Swedish culture.

One Summer of Happiness © Folkets Hus & Parker Foto Ulf Knöppel

The movie opens with a funeral at a country church. The Minister preaches fire and brimstone against, “The new age, which has swept into our quiet little corner of the world.”

The story is of a young student from the city who leaves to spend a summer with his uncle, in the small farming village his family once came from. Except for his ill-fated motorcycle, there is little in the village to indicate this is the middle of the 20th century. Music comes from accordions, horses pull the ploughs. Yet times they are a-changing. The lure of the big city and new sexual mores are sweeping the land, bringing mostly misery to the women, it seems.

Miss Julie, based on August Strindberg’s 1888 play, plays on similar themes of sex and class. However, this film is set in an age firmly in the grip of the old feudal Sweden. Miss Julie, the aristocratic mistress of a manor house, was raised by her free-thinking mother to act like a man. Now it is midsummer’s eve and she is a confused adult with a newly broken engagement. She is alone in the house with “the people”. This includes Jean, her socially ambitious and gentlemanly servant of lowly origins. An affair between them can only lead to disaster.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg

April 28, 2010

Four Shades of Brown

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Four shades of Brown (released in 2004 and directed by Thomas Alfredson) is (so far) the magnum opus of Killinggänget. A group of Swedish writers, actors and comedians that started out in 1992 with the TV sketch comedy show I manegen med Glenn Killing.

Still from Four Shades of Brown

Four Shades of Brown, opens with aerial shots of various Swedish landscapes, set to marching music. This sets the tone for what is to come. It is kind of an aerial shot of state of the Swedish national soul in the early 2000s. Its dryly humorous investigation of Sweden and Swedish culture contains equal parts love, mockery and melancholia.

The film is a whopping 192 minutes long, but don’t let that scare you. It feels about half as long as some far shorter films I have sat through in my life. It consists of four separate stories, set in four different corners of Sweden. They all deal with similar themes, fathers, marriage and death being some of the more prominent ones.

There is the hotel owner obsessed with good taste and minimalist design. The polygamous Buddhist jockey and his descendants. The therapy group consisting of various types of compulsive liars. And the pet cremator and his family.

These stories bring out the somewhat absurd undertone in Swedish life. A note of quiet oddness that is halfway between hysteric comedy and silent agony. In this it is masterful and similar to the films of Roy Andersson. No wonder the Killinggänget went silent for five years after Four Shades of Brown. It is hard to top.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg

April 27, 2010

Heaven’s Heart

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As he introduced Heaven’s Heart, producer Jonas Fredriksen commented it depicted, “The most brutal war that has ever taken place.” … “The merciless battlefield called marriage.” That might be about right. Or perhaps it is just about our fears of mediocricy and loneliness. The panic of wasting our lives, of being useless, that overwhelms the best of us at the worst of times.

Heaven's Heart

The film, written and directed by a Dane, Simon Staho, is populated two married couples. All the spouses are close friends and the action is set mainly in their respective apartments. “She’s content,” one of the husbands bitterly comments on his wife’s lack of interest in sex. (Though only with him, as it turns out.) “I am content,” the other husband says to his wife, when she wonders if there isn’t more to life. Later that same man will say “I am forty-five years old. I don’t have time to merely be content. I need to be happy.”

Don’t we all.

The film features well-known Swedish actors. Lena Endre, among others. She also starred in Ingmar Bergman’s Trolösa (Faithless). Indeed this movie has shades of Bergman and Lars Norén, a well-known Swedish playright. Somehow the quiet desperation of bourgeois coupledom seems to endure as an endless fountain of storylines. And why shouldn’t it.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg

April 26, 2010

Frostbite

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Anders Banke’s Frostbite has plenty of gushing blood, out-of-control teenage vampires and a massacred family pet, or two.

Photo credit NonStop Sales

The opening scene takes place in the Ukrainian wilds, toward the end of World War II. Swedish, Finnish and German soldiers fighting together as SS volunteers, march aimlessly through snow and ice, fleeing the Red Army. They take refuge in a cabin that turns out to house something they can’t fight with guns.

Next we are in present times, in a small town in the north of Sweden, during the polar night, when the sun doesn’t rise for a month. Vampires, demons from the past, darkness, you see where this is going, no?

A young girl and her mother have recently moved to this small town. The mother is a doctor, set to work at the local hospital. It soon becomes clear that strange things are afoot. At the hospital the sinister head doctor has a mystery “private patient” in a coma. And something undead seems to lurk in the bushes. When an intern at the hospital steals a box of mysterious blood-red pills, all hell breaks loose. Literally.

There are some great visual puns, and a few verbal ones too, in this good old-fashioned gore fest. I could go on about fears of uncontrollable teenage sexuality and unprocessed Swedish war guilt, or something along those lines. But then perhaps sometimes a vampire is just a vampire.

Sarah Clyne Sundberg

April 25, 2010