Les filles

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.

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.

"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.

Theres alot of things in this movie I hate, thats because the world has already become what this film wanted to achieve. And thats why it feels so gratis and tedious, because these feministic Initiatives that "Flickorna" are suggesting have already been, more or less, accepted by social standards today.

Figures appear and are gone - interrupted, overheard or obscured by something else. Because here are thousand of things squashed about space. Put togheter with alot of creativity, anger and passion. Three female actors tour with "Lysistrate", and in a forest there is a living room, in a cinema you throw eggs at Stalin, in a bar the shirts come off, on a street the BridalBrigade forms - and then napalm and serpentines on it. Despite all this commotion Mai Zetterling actually manages to stay steadfast on the directorial cotroll.

Men rule and the world burns, and it is 1968. Men ruled and the world burned 411 BC as well, when Aristophanes wrote his play. To end the 20-year war between Athens and Sparta, Lysistrate makes women swear to deny men sex.

The theater group heads north. "Lysistrate" is supposed to make people discuss, but no one understands what it is about. World peace and equal conditions are good, but what you want most of all is a sofa group.

The only mistake is that Zetterling makes a big cluster caused in a cinematographic array of clichés and pre-art that leaves one largely untouched. It may be that pre-art is a stylistic grip in "The Girls", a way of playfully mixing imagination and reality. But most of the time it is an optional, unintentional parody or superficial image experiment. Nevertheless, its provocative content, its bold and playful form, its humor and warmth, has made it something of a cult.

Due to the death of the actor and director Gunnel Lindblom, I got the chance to see this movie free on SVT.

'Flickorna' (the English title is 'The Girls'), made in 1968, was probably the most ambitious film in the directorial career of Mai Zetterling, a personality of Swedish cinema that I discovered while watching this film. Mai launched herself as an actress and had quite a bit of success in Sweden as well as in England and the United States, but when she was approaching the age of 40 she decided to abandon acting and go behind the camera as a director. She would return to acting towards the end of her life to confront Anjelica Houston in 'The Witches'. 'Flickorna' was her third film, a very interesting but also very controversial production, both for its unusual format and for its declared political, pacifist and feminist content. We can say that it is a manifesto expressed through refined artistic means. The reception was mixed, the audience and some critics turned their backs on the film, and Mai Zetterling did not direct anything for almost ten years. I liked the film, especially because it seems to me to have become terribly topical again.

The main heroines of the film are three actresses who go on tour in remote regions of Sweden with a performance of Aristophanes' 'Lysistrata'. They are three mature women, each facing their own problems in their personal lives. Liz's marriage is on the verge of falling apart because of her husband, who already has a mistress and is looking for ways to get out of the relationship. Marianne is a single mother who is forced to take her baby to rehearsals and on tour, entrusting him to the care of babysitters. Gunilla already has four children, whom she leaves during the tour in the care of her husband, who is not too happy about the situation. Their experiences intertwine with the feminist and pacifist text and message of the classic comedy, which is used to convey women's feelings, but also their ideology. But is this form of engaged theater relevant and effective? Liz's attempt to engage the audience in a discussion about the meaning of the play after the performance is a failure.

The film is made in 1968, a turning point and perhaps the most revolutionary year of the Cold War - the year of the student uprisings in Paris, the protests against the Vietnam War in the USA and the Prague Spring and its crushing by the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet tanks. Mai Zetterling was part of Ingmar Bergman's circle of collaborators and friends, but her art is much more explicitly committed to feminist and pacifist ideologies. The three actresses who play the main roles - Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom - were also among Bergman's collaborators in theatre and film. I really liked the way personal problems are combined with political messages, the theatre in the film alternating the lines on stage with sequences from the lives of the protagonists. Aristophanes' text remains relevant to this day and will continue to resonate with viewers as long as women's equality in rights and opportunities is not fully achieved and as long as wars continue to be decided and fought by men. The questions that 'Flickorna' asks about the place of women in society, about the power of art and the influence of culture in politics and about peace as an alternative to the endless chain of wars and violence are brought to the screen in an elegant manner and seem painfully relevant today more than ever.