Pauline Kael called this movie a combination of "the worst of Fellini and the worst of Bergman," and glib as that sounds, she's right--it exactly locates the leading pretensions of the era's art cinema flavors, and combines them in a particularly superficial and flashy way that lacks either great director's depth, originality or humor. The rather confused structure interweaves past and present as the grown heir to a country estate brings his fiancee there, where he recalls his difficult childhood being alternately amused, abused and ignored by self-absorbed parents. The latter use their wealth and privilege to be kingpins of a cartoonishly decadent social scene. But the film isn't satire--we're meant to take its grotesques very seriously as some statement about, you know, Society, though they only resemble figures from other movies. At the end we're apparently to understand that the present-day characters have somehow been liberated from the chains of the past, but that catharsis rings hollow, particularly since those characters are just as one-dimensional as the wealthy sinners in the flashbacks.
Zetterling's other directorial movies are said to be good, so maybe this was just her auteurist folly, all too obviously derivative of other auteurs' follies. But the imitative quality robs of it any genuine emotion, or even pleasure in flamboyance, though it's well-shot and edited. There's some nudity, a scene about (though not graphically depicting) masturbation, and other content that must have seemed terribly shocking in 1966. (Indeed, the film's most lasting notoriety came from Shirley Temple Black having quit a festival jury in a highly publicized huff over the inclusion of this "pornography." Little did she know how much more pornographic movies would get, or how soon.) But the problem here is that there's nary a single moment that feels organic--everything is trying so HARD to be "shocking." Which pretty much kills any shock value, at least for me.
Anyway, it's a garish, self-important but empty-headed effort that was never a good movie, but now serves as a vivid time capsule of just how merrily (and self-consciously) taboos were being freshly broken at the time of its making. Somehow the overstaged quasi-orgies and such aren't much fun, even without the equally bogus "But think about the child!!" hand-wringing accompanying them. But if you wanna see a personification of what was then called (among other things) "the New Permissiveness," this is it, in a nutshell. Of COURSE Shirley Temple was appalled. You can practically sense the filmmakers congratulating themselves that she would be.
