A Swedish Love Story (En kärlekshistoria) (1970) and corona

En Kærlighedshistorie

We are now a week into lockdown and while I am personally doing okay, I am used to working from home, the reality of the epidemic is starting to show. Tonight it was announced that malls restaurants, hairdressers etc. will shut down as well. It is getting very quiet around here and at the hospitals the beds are starting to fill. Huge efforts have been made to increase capacity and buy time. Now we will see if it is enough.

To the film… “En Kärlekshistoria” (“A Swedish Lovestory”) is one of the special additions to the Danish edition of the Book. It replaces “Deep End”, which I have previously deplored as a poor choice by the editors. Not that “En Kärlekshistoria” is a bad movie, but I would much rather have ditched “El Topo”. Also, I wonder why the Danish editors found a need to add so many Swedish movies, but they must have thought that there are not enough quality movies from Denmark.

Anyway, “En Kärlekshistoria” is a movie by Roy Andersson, a director who is still active, though there are long and far between his movies. It is one of those movies that are thin on plot but instead serve as a character study. In this case the character must be the country itself in 1970. It seems to take a broad view and presents life as it looks for a group of people representing two families, tied together by a teenage love affair.

This young couple are the prominent characters here. Pär (Rolf Sohlman) is 15 years old and helps out in his father’s garage while Annika (Ann-Sofie Kylin) is “almost 14”. Their love story is exactly as awkward and insecure as you would expect but also sweet and innocent. Only, they are very young. I mean, really young. I kept seeing them as children dabbling in things they are not entirely ready for yet: smoking, drinking, staying out at night and sex. Maybe I am an old prude and the times were different back then (certainly social distance was not a thing…) but I kept feeling icky about them. Annika has not yet anything resembling adult… shapes and Pär has the maturity of, well, a 15 year old boy.

Still, in many ways, their approach to life is far preferable to their elders. Especially Annika’s family is on the verge on melting down and Pär’s is not much better. Annika’s aunt Eva (Anita Lindblom) is in a violent relationship and fluked her dream job. Pär’s grandfather is openly complaining about how lonely he is and Annika’s father, John (Bertil Norström) is disillusioned and suffers a breakdown near the conclusion on the film.

The climax of the movie is a midsummer party at Pär’s parents cottage where Annika’s family are invited. The gaiety is strangely at odds with the meltdown lurking beneath and when John disappear everybody are ready to believe the worst. Except Annika and Pär who are completely oblivious to anything but themselves.

What I liked about this movie was how contemporary it is. It feels like a snapshot of life in Sweden that particular summer. What they do, talk about, drive, eat and worry about. It is not a documentary, but it feels like something close. It has been called social realistic, but instead of zooming in on a particular issue, it aims far wider and becomes more like a panorama. As such a window into a time that was, it is brilliant.

Probably not a movie for everybody, but with a wry, deadpan humor to live it up, I found it more enjoyable that I expected.

  

 

Bedroom Mazurka (1970) and Corona

Off-List: Mazurka på sengekanten and a Corona update

I am writing this review on the evening where Denmark has officially shut down due to the Corona virus epidemic. The numbers of infected are increasing exponentially and there is a real fear we might get Italian or Chinese conditions. We may not personally be in danger, but we are very concerned for our elderly relatives. I will keep you updated here on the blog.

On such a note it seems almost obscene to review a light comedy, but frankly, this is exactly what you need in these situations.

Today’s movie is the second off-List movie for 1970 and the Danish contribution to my three picks.

“Mazurka på sengekanten” (”Bedroom Mazurka”) was chosen, partly because 1970 was not a great year for Danish movies and partly because it marked the beginning of a long string of similar movies in the seventies, making it culturally significant.

The new thing was that a dash of soft-porn was added to the sort of light, silly comedies that had developed through the sixties. Pornography had just been legalized and suddenly everybody thought this was this new awesome thing that everybody wanted. The resulting hybrid, the erotic comedy, would eventually devolve into sleazy and tacky excuses for producing and watching porn, but in 1970 this was still new and there is a remarkable innocence to this, the first movie in the series.

On the boarding school Krabbesøgård the current principal (Axel Strøbye) has been picked as the next minister of culture and so a new principal must be selected. The favorite for the position is the young teacher Max Mikkelsen (Ole Søltoft) who happens to be much liked by the students for his liberal principles. Only problem is that according to traditions a principal must be married or at least engaged and Max is… ahem… a virgin.

The students set out to help Max since the second in line for the job, a pedantic teacher known as “The Doormat” (Poul Hagen), is generally despised. Their task is to find a suitable girl for Max in record time. Also Max is digging into the subject, but being hopelessly ignorant and innocent his is a series of blunders.

It sounds silly and it sounds (and is) mainly as an excuse to get Max sexually involved with a lot of women, but I was surprised how funny it also is. The reputation of the series is pretty bad but in this first installment the comedy worked big time. Partly of course because of a stellar cast, Axel Strøbye, Poul Hagen and Karl Stegger are among the giants in Danish comedy, but also because it is really very innocent. The soft-porn elements are very soft indeed and it surprised my how little you actually see and how light it is. Sure, there are a lot of topless girls going around, but that is mostly for comedic effect and they are not anywhere as hard pumped as we are used to in mainstream movies today. Whenever the movie toned the soft-porn down it worked great, whereas insistence on making it daring resulted in scenes and elements that worked less great. For example I do not understand why most girls in the movie would wear flimsy shirts without a bra in regular, non-erotic scenes, whereas the under-stimulated Erna (Annie Birgit Garde), wife of the principal worked all the sexual references with wonderful comedic timing.

“Mazurka på sengekanten” is not a movie for children, but it is also not a tacky and cheap excuse to show skin. It is far more tasteful than American Pie and funnier too, but not something that could or should be made today. In that sense it belongs to a narrow pocket in time where this was possible and for that it is very special.

I would certainly recommend it. It is a solid laugh.

Deep End (1970)

Deep End

I have arrived at another diversion from the Book I follow (the Danish edition) and the full, official List. Where the Danish List have included the Swedish “En Kärlekshistoria”, it replaces the movie “Deep End”. My personal opinion is that the Danish editors could easily have found a better movie to ditch as “Deep End” is one of the better movies of 1970 so far.

For a period where oddness seems par for the course, “Deep End” is a an odd movie, but unlike most of the other odd movies I have watched it works to the benefit of the movie. This movie stands out because of this oddness.

“Deep End” is a movie written and directed by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, who at the time hardly spoke English. It takes place in England with an English cast in the principal roles, but is filmed by a German crew, mostly in Munich. This strange mix comes through in the tone of the movie that is unlike any other English movie I ever saw.

The 15 year old boy Mike (John Moulder Brown) starts working at the Deptford public bath as a bath attendant and is immediately take by the older, but still very young and pretty Susan (Jane Asher) who is working as his counterpart in the women’s section and instructing him in his job. Part of this job is to “attend” some clients of the opposite sex, providing sexual favors. Mike is an innocent and completely inexperienced boy and is quite taken aback by the advances of these older women. He is also too young to know what to do about his infatuation with Susan.

Susan is a flirt. She has a fiancé whom she is half serious about (despite a lot of bickering), she has an affair with the older swimming teacher, a dirty old man who loves to touch up girls inappropriately, and she willingly offers services to the males clients in the bath. Mike, she leads on with one hand and puts off with the other and Mike is very confused and frustrated.

What starts out as an innocent infatuation soon darkens into obsession and madness as Mike completely looses it and that is the drama of the movie.

What makes this movie work so well is the innocence and likability of Mike. He seems to be such a good boy and therefore it hurts so much when he loses it. He is going places where you scream “DON’T!”, partly from shared embarrassment and partly because his lack of filter makes him do deeply counter productive things, such a follow Susan and her fiancé into a cinema to touch her up or follow her on the Underground with a huge cut-out of an almost naked lady who may or may-not be Susan. Even in his maddest endeavors he remains this sweet and innocent boy that we really want to like.

“Deep End” also doses a large amount of dark humor into the ongoings. Not so much gags as absurdities such as the older woman (Diana Dors) getting off on pulling a desperately fighting Mike into her oversize bosom, or the sausage vendor who sells a lot of hot dogs to Mike with the same ridiculous routine and having so good business of it that he end up offering him hotdogs for free. The humor has the effect of making Mike’s plight even more painful to watch rather than distracting from it and so it serves the movie perfectly.

There is a lot of nudity in “Deep End”, which makes perfect sense because it is a story about sexual frustration and madness, but where an ordinary British movie of this period would likely hesitate on the issue, “Deep End goes all in. My guess is that this is the Skolimowski / German production influence and rather than being put off by it, it is clear that the movie needs this to have the right impact. My favorite example is the porn movie Susan and her fiancé is watching. This is such a ridiculous and funny and actually rather innocent affair and I could not help laughing, but it also demonstrates the pedestal on which the young boy is placing sex and Susan in particular.

The only drawback is that I found the decent into madness too sudden and too desperate to be fully believable. This may be a very young and inexperienced boy, but I believe most young men would have filter enough to stop themselves from going this far.

It is a minor objection though and on the whole, I would recommend this movie.

   

The Spider's Strategem (La Strategia del Ragno) (1970)

Edderkoppens strategi

“The Spider’s Stratagem” (“Strategia del ragno”) is another one of those movies I cannot work out. This era seems to overflow with this sort of movies and I am getting tired of them, hence my not very enthusiastic review.

Athos Magnani (Giulio Brogi) arrives in the small, Italian town of Tara. His father died here before he was born and now his father’s old mistress Draifa (Alida Valli) wants to see him. She wants him to find his father’s murderers and although he first refuses, he is convinced to stay and look into it when several of the townspeople seem intent on discouraging him.

This sounds like an interesting thriller plot and I suppose this could have been that. An investigation, mysterious adversaries, hidden agendas and dark secrets.

However, this is a Bernardo Bertolucci movie and he does not seem to be content with making a thriller. Instead he wraps it in weirdness to create an ambience of unreal that makes Twin Peaks look ordinary. Tara is populated with old people, everybody says weird things and a standard conversation can suddenly shift to odd directions. Athos is apparently a clone of his father, the mistress wants him to be his father etcetera etcetera. This makes it entirely clear that there is another agenda than the murder mystery, but what this agenda is, is apparently up to us, the viewers to work out. I have mentioned this before, I dislike it with a vengeance when filmmakers sacrifice causality for symbolism. I do not mind symbolism, but not at the expense of a logical or sensical plot and well, Bertolucci did not receive that brief.

It does not help at all that Bertolucci has a way of making films that seem to repel my attention. Every few minutes my attention will drift away and I have to forcibly redirect it at the movie. I cannot say exactly what it is, the pacing, the weaving, the dialogue or something else. The result is that there are gaps in the narrative as if I had fallen asleep a few times in the course of the movie. Jumps in the story I cannot explain, though I promise, I did not sleep.

There is a resolution to the murder mystery and it is something about preserving a myth, but I cannot say it is very satisfying and how that ties in with Athos being stuck in town I do not understand. The Book writes something about that Athos is becoming his father, but except for Draifa wanting him to be his old man, I do not see that at all. Frankly the idea that he is sucked into the town is not very well developed.

Alida Valli is one of the grand ladies of Italian film and it was fun to see her again, although her role is creepy. But that is just about the only positive thing I can say about this movie.

Not recommended.

 

Woodstock (1970)

Woodstock

Back in the nineties I was a frequent visitor on the Roskilde festival. This is the largest music festival in Denmark and in that era we would typically be around 100.000 people on the festival. Sleeping in tents, walking around in mud or dust depending on the weather and partying to awesome music from the stages. We were young and this was about the greatest thing that would happen all year. One year I missed REM because I had an exam in groundwater hydrology, but I sat there at the exam already wearing my festival outfit and the bag ready next to my table so I could take the first train and catch up on the festival.

All this would not have existed had it not been for the Woodstock festival in 1969.

Woodstock is known as the mother of all music festivals, at least the groovy kind, and you would have been living under a rock if you had never heard of it. Growing up the Woodstock festival seemed legendary, almost mythical as the event referred to but rarely actually explained. Well, this movie, Woodstock, the film, does that and it does it very well.

The Woodstock documentary is four hours long and covers practically all aspects of the festival. We see the construction of the stages on the fields and people starting to trickle in. The trickle becomes a flood and suddenly there are four or five times more people than anticipated. The ticket system breaks down and the festival is now free. In small vignettes we see the festival guests lying stoned, dancing, looking for each other, scrambling to find food in what is developing into a disaster area with supplies being flown in. Locals are interviewed, some happy, some not so happy. But mostly there is a lot of music. Really a lot.

The most remarkable from a technical point of view is that there is not narration whatsoever. Sometimes there is an interviewer, or we hear the announcer from the stage call out messages, but nothing is ever explained. The music is only introduced in the very end, but while you watch you have to guess who is playing. This may seem like a drawback, but it is not. The pictures and the interviews speak for themselves. The impressionistic style gives you the feeling of being there and how many times have I not been standing in front of a stage wondering who is actually playing? Yeah, I guess I was not so clear-headed, but neither was the crowd at Woodstock.

The Woodstock documentary won and was nominated for several Academy awards and it was well deserved. Apparently, Woodstock the movie was a landmark in music filming, and I was finding the look and feel very modern. My only problem was that four hours IS a long time and so, during the music parts I would often zone out and just enjoy the music.

I am not an expert on music from the late sixties, but I did recognize a lot of the names and songs. Joe Cocker and Jimmi Hendrix got me forward in my chair and Sly and the Family Stone really had a party going. It is my impression that anybody who was somebody in music was there, on Woodstock.

From an organizational point of view Woodstock was a disaster. Too many people, too little organization, a collapsed ticketing system and insufficient food and sanitation. The financial loss of the backers has huge and the local community apparently passed laws to prevent another festival like this from ever happening again.

Yet culturally Woodstock was a landmark event, one of the largest gathering of young people ever and a defining event for the counterculture that can be felt today. I am happy that it was documented through such an excellent documentary and, incidentally, the documentary grossed a lot more at the box office than the losses suffered by the festival, so there is that.

I have gotten too old to go to Roskilde festival, but for me those were defining events in my youth, just as the Woodstock festival was for a lot of young people back in its day. The world would not have looked the same without it and this movie is the reason we can still experience it.

 

 

Kelly's Heroes (1970)

Off-List: Kelly's Heroes

The first off-List movie of 1970 is “Kelly’s Heroes”, a movie which would never make it to the List, but nevertheless a perfect antidote to the wave of very serious and high-brow movies hitting me lately.

“Kelly’s Heroes” is certainly neither serious, nor high-brow, but fun and enjoyable, especially if you do not think too much about what you are watching.

During World War II a unit of the American army gets wind of a fortune in gold lying almost unguarded 30 miles behind the front. Kelly (Clint Eastwood), a demoted lieutenant, forms a small task force to secretly sneak in to pilfer this gold. Since the “insignificant” guard includes three of the dreaded Tiger tanks, Kelly recruits Oddball and his band of three Sherman tanks. Oddball (Donald Sutherland) is the only hippie in the American army and the source of much hilarity.

The movie follows the set-up, the move in and the attack on the town with a lot of focus on the banter and the shenanigans done to fool both the American brass and the Germans. That is all very enjoyable, such as Oddball hoping that positive vibes will ensure there will be a bridge for him. When it is blown up anyway, he makes a phone call from a French café to a bridging unit and orders a bridge to be delivered 30 miles behind the lines. This silliness is mixed with the usual fighting and shooting you would expect in a war movie resulting in this odd combination of a fun war movie.

The combination should not work and it probably would not today, but it did back then, at least until you start thinking about what you are watching. People die like flies and the unit takes some substantial losses with little more than a shrug and a “yeah, we a tough”. It takes a particular boyish gung-ho attitude to reconciliate this with the hilarity, but somehow “Kelly’s Heroes fly over that, as it does with all the historical inaccuracies. The battles around Nancy was in the autumn, not at the height of summer, there does not seem to be a Clermont near Nancy and the set in Yugoslavia carries only vague resemblance to France. Not to mention a hippie in WWII…

Yet, who cares, this is just fun and when Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland moves out, that is all that matters. A particular favorite is the scene where the three of them walk down the street to face the Tiger tank in front of the bank in Western style. This is totally high noon with a rip-off Morricone score, which seems to be a reference to Clint Eastwood’s Sergio Leone characters. It totally cracked me up.

Back in the day movie critics tore it to pieces, but its boyish appeal has made it survive the decades and it still occasionally pops up on television. That is a lot more than can be said about most other movies from 1970.

Enjoyable movies do not have to make a lot of sense or be particularly clever. Sometimes some gung-ho tongue-in-cheek is enough to carry a film. And of course Clint Eastwood. And some positive vibes.

Five Easy Pieces (1970)

 

Five Easy Pieces

Finally, after weeks of lackluster cinematic nourishment, I get to watch something exciting. “Five Easy Pieces” was exactly that interesting and different an experience I was craving.

Robert Dupea (Jack Nicholson) is living a random existence. He is living with a girl, Rayette (Karen Black), whom he clearly dates for the sex and little else, certainly not what is inside her head, and works on an oilrig as a grunt. Here he has befriended Elton (Billy Bush) with whom he plays poker and bowling and occasionally screws his wife. It is pretty clear that Robert lives a life with as few hard attachments as possible and that everything is temporary. When Elton gets arrested for an old offense it is time to quit the job and Robert heads to Los Angeles to meet his sister, Partita.

Partita Dupea (Lois Smith) is a classical pianist, currently making a recoding in a studio, and we learn that so is Robert and in fact his entire family. Partita begs him to come home as their father is very ill and it is time to be reconciled. Robert first wants to go alone, but when Rayette throws a fit he agrees to bring her along, but installs her on a motel.

At the family home Robert meets Catherine (Susan Anspach) whom he makes a successful pass on whereupon Rayette shows up and everything turns sour for Robert.

What now, Robert Dupea?

This does not sound super interesting in summary, but it is. Jack Nicholson, who was a joy to watch, was perfectly casted as the drifter Robert. Behind his hard surface there is a desperate child who is afraid to commit and keeps running away instead of facing the music. As a portrait of a man who does not want to take the consequences of his actions it is brilliant. I would normally not enjoy a depressing topic like that but here it was made interesting. It helps that there is a certain wry humor throughout. Rayette really has the depth of puddle after a light rain, in the studio the technicians are exasperated when Partita starts humming horribly to her playing and so forth, but it gets very black and delicious when Rayette shows up at the family home. Robert’s escapade with Catherine is in shambles and Rayette perfectly sabotages a highbrow get-together by her sheer presence.

The best part however is the ending. Without revealing anything I can certainly say that this was not the ending I expected, but in hindsight probably the right and natural ending. What sort of resolution do you expect in a movie about a man who abhors resolutions?

“Five Easy Pieces” is a movie that looks ahead, into the seventies, with very little glamour, but excellent human portraits. As such I can certainly say I have left the sixties behind and arrived at a new modernity, a continuation from “Midnight Cowboy”.

Then, of course, Jack Nicholson is a big reason for watching this movie. He is young here (with hair) and it is before “The Shining” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest” but you can already see those devilish traits that would become his trademarks later on and in fact, Jack Nicholson had already been doing movies for twelve years at this point. Not a novice at all.

“Five Easy Pieces” is a definite recommendation from me and not just because the bar on the List have been significantly lowered lately.