Flickorna

This is an amazing underrated movie. It' funny, intelligent and deals critically with gender issues and with the difficulty in reaching out to people and producing change. Of course, if you're really sexist this film is not for you, you surely won't agree with me. There are many things I liked about this movie, but I'd like to point out two.

First, about it's form. It's not a traditional movie, it has some non realist (metaphorical or surreal) scenes, it mixes the reality of the film with the memories, desires and imagination of the characters, it mixes the Swedish life of it's time with Aristophanes play Lysistrata and keeps jumping from one to the other. So you have to think actively to interpret the meaning of these jumps. If you don't like this kind of direction and prefer a more traditional one, perhaps you won't like this movie as much as me (or you will end up thinking the film doesn't have a plot just because you couldn't follow it like some other reviewers). But be assured that this is not confusing nor formalist. It always has meaning and is always related to reality. And this is incredible in a time that most of the art that tries to reach beyond traditional forms looses meaning and relation to reality becoming formalist and sometimes even irrationalist.

Second, about the gender issues. I also liked a lot that it's not a plain movie in which the protagonists give a speech about women freedom and the women rise in a revolt. Actually one may say that this movie is more about trying to reach out and hitting a wall. About women not being taken seriously in a sexist society no matter how hard and seriously they try. Not even by most of the other women. And in this sense, the choice of Lysistrata as a mean to produce change is very good, because the women's revolt in this play was meant to be a joke and not taken seriously. In ancient Athens women were not allowed in the comedies, only in the tragedies, so this play was written by a man, to be represented by a cast of men for an audience of men and not to reach out to women. The critical power of the play, if you may say so, is in the fact that it was an anti-war play, it was meant to help to increase support for a peace treaty with Sparta, but not to really deal with gender issues in the sexist ancient Greece.

All in all this was an avant-garde movie way ahead of it's time. And I disagree with the reviews that state that this is a dated movie. Of course it bears the marks of it's time (like every movie), but perhaps it may even be better appreciated now than when it was filmed.

If you liked this movie you may want to check out Älskande par (Loving Couples), another movie of Mai Zetterling that touch gender issues, but not in such a direct way and with a less innovative and experimental directorial style.

Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, and Gunnel Lindblom go on tour with LYSISTRATA and become radicalized into political agency by the play and the reactions -- or lack of reactions -- to it.

Mai Zetterling's film disappeared from the theaters after three weeks of awful receipts. The critics -- men, of course -- didn't care for this tale of how these women's real lives bonded with their stage lives to create a third life, part dream, part hallucination, with the men reduced to indistinguishable, impotent actors driven simply by their lusts for sex and dull normality.

The movie has gained respect over the years, with feminists acclaiming it. But were the critics of the time so wrong? Aristophanes' play has often often attracted the attention of modern writers and producers. They've made modern-dress novels, and plays and movies, and they seem to have a uniformly poor reception. Perhaps the attraction of the source material to Ms Zetterling was it was one of the few works of classic literature in which women had agency. Whereas Aristophanes intended this as mockery of the new, more democratic spirit of Athens that he so despised, offering peace as so obvious that even women could see it, and men being such brutes that they'd do anything for sexual release. He was not making an argument for extending the franchise to women; he wanted a return to the Good Old Days, when aristocrats with names like Aristophanes were in charge.

Perhaps the failing here is Ms Zetterling's honesty. Like Spike Jones, in his gloss on the play, CHI-RAQ, she points out the hypocrisy of the class she argues for, their cowardice in refusing to accept responsibility. That's one of the risks of satire. Once you've offended everyone, there aren't going to be many fans.

I've just seen this film today, 19 Sept., and couldn't help but think of the New York terrorist attack. I read a letter to the editor about the attack and it said that if women were ruling the world the attacks would never have happened. However, this prescient film shows that that ain't necessarily so.

What's so good about this film is the fair treatment it gives of women, showing their frivolous and silly side as well as the struggle to deal with their roles in their world. I liked the fight between the women, and the pathetic attempt Liz made to stir her audience into speaking, without any thought for who it was she addressed.

Thirty-three years after it was made, the film is relevant and moving.

"That's why we called a meeting of all women. We can wait no longer. Now you have to listen to us. It's our turn to talk. It's your turn to listen, just as we've had to listen in the past."

In 1968, with the world teetering on the edge of madness, Mai Zetterling makes a plea for women to stand up for themselves and start changing the world, not putting up with the status quo or their subordinate positions any longer. The premise has three women travelling as part of a theater troupe to put on a performance of Lysistrata, Aristophanes' play about women who organize to withhold sex in the attempt to get men to stop waging the Peloponnesian War, which is a perfect parallel. Zetterling interweaves the real world for these women with personal memories, fantastical daydreams, and occasional mind-reading to create a delirious blend of visual images and powerful satire.

If it's not already obvious, we see woman's perspective in many ways, but often relating to the bad behavior of men. For the two women who are married, one of their husbands immediately rings up two lovers the moment his wife leaves town, and both men have old-fashioned, condescending views about their wives working in the first place. The unmarried woman in the troupe is having an affair with a married man who makes empty promises to end things with his wife. These men all have a big laugh and yuck it up over the things the women are trying to express in the play and offstage. Meanwhile, younger men make crude comments about their bodies as the enter a restaurant, and other men aggressively try to pick them up. All of that may sound heavy-handed, but it was delivered artistically, and rang true.

Another element of this perspective is simply the presence of a crying baby, which I found refreshing given how big a part of real life this is, and how little we see it in movies. The burden of child rearing, especially when it's assumed to be the woman's priority, is well represented here, even if it doesn't make up a lot of the runtime.

There is also a fair bit of criticism about women as well, those who are too complacent or too satisfied to let others decide things in the world. In one scene where Zetterling wanders into the minds of her characters, Lysistrata (er, Liz, get it?) meets a bourgeois couple in the small northern town who agree to have dinner with her. The husband's thoughts gravitate towards her appearance like a compass needle finding north, and the wife's vary between confusion over her visitor's deep thoughts and annoyance at comments she thinks are too personal. In another moment, after a performance, Liz asks the audience to stay and discuss the play and how it relates to real life at a deeper level, but they only stare at her, dumbfounded, men and women included. "Don't you understand that it's we who make the world what it is?" she shouts to awkward silence. We also see the women break out into a fight amongst themselves, a nice little acknowledgment that peace and harmony is not necessarily a consequence of female empowerment.

If it all sounds like 'too much,' there are many wonderfully surreal moments here which helped keep the feeling of this 'message' film relatively light. One example is Liz imagining herself stripping while trying to answer reporter's questions about her behavior, showing the feelings of her vulnerability and how it's only then that men begin to show genuine interest in what she's doing. In another hilarious moment, the husband unpacks his lovers out of a large standing trunk he's brought them to the hotel in, undressing them calmly and tucking them into bed while calmly denying their existence. There are many others. It's all rendered beautifully by the black and white cinematography from Rune Ericson, and this has a very deep cast, including Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, Gunnar Björnstrand, and Erland Josephson, all of whom are strong here. Just a great film, still relevant today, and very entertaining.

I believe this movie represents how it felt to be an out-spoken feminist in the 60s. The people you were preaching to weren't listening, the people you were preaching against were laughing of you. It must have been a terrible struggle, and this movie portrays this in an interesting manner.

However, while feminism movement is still going strong (and rightfully so), this movie does not hold up as that relevant any more. The feminist struggle was different back then than now, and while some of the problems are the same, the "war" (as they call it in the film) is different, making this movie feel as dated as it is.

The highlights of the movie are some of the surreal scenes. I believe this is the only movie with a chase scene where a snowmobile is chasing a kicksled.

So, I would say watch this if you are interested in either feminism in cinema, or the situation of the feminists in the 60s and 70s. Or if you are interested in (swedish) film history, as this release caused some controversy. But if you are a casual moviegoer that (amazingly) stumbles upon this, you probably will not be too happy.