This Swedish film directed by Hasse Eckman is regarded in Sweden as one of their national cinema classics, prior to Ingmar Bergman, who raised Swedish cinema to an even higher level. This film is well made and powerful in revealing the deficiencies of character in a series of people in one girl's life. The title of the film refers to a portrait of her painted with hyacinths. Eva Henning (1920-2016, who retired from acting in 1972) plays the girl Dagmar Brink who shortly after the film begins commits suicide. She leaves all her possessions to some neighbours, Mr. And Mrs. Wikner, whom she barely knew, saying in a suicide note to them that she has no family or friends. Mr Wikner becomes very distraught and decides to try to find out why such an attractive girl should kill herself for no known reason. This leads him into a lengthy search, where he interviews a succession of people who had known her in the past, and their memories are dramatized in flashbacks of an intensely emotional kind. In one we discover that she visited her biological father, a banker, for the first time only to be coldly rejected by him. (Her mother has been dead for some time.) Wikner meets her former husband who says their marriage broke up because he learned that before he knew her she had been in love with someone name Alex, whom she refuses to discuss except to admit that she and Alex can never be together, which has made her heart-broken. The story is very complex, and person after person is revealed, each with a dramatic incident to tell. Wikner is after answers, and he encounters answer after answer without however coming up with any solutions. The film is therefore rather bleak and confirms everything anybody ever thought about the Swedes being humourless depressives, an image Bergman was later to fail to dispel. But it is not only depression and loneliness that are at work in this story, for a series of appalling betrayals are revealed. This is a really fascinating tale of psychological detective work. The film is indeed a classic of its kind. I wonder if it is commercially available, as I got my copy from the internet site Movie Detective, who supply the rarest of foreign films with English subtitles to people like me who are obsessives about the history of international cinema and like nothing better than to discover great forgotten gems, especially in fringe languages.
