Eu Sou Curiosa - Amarelo

In the sixties, the Swedish films were known to be the most sexually graphic, but this is the one that really rocked the world… It was shocking in its uninhibited portrayal of sex and in its fulminating piece of social democracy… It was a significant step forward in getting the adult film shown in the theaters…

The film comes in two editions, blue and yellow… The blue version focuses more on the political issues and the yellow concentrates on the emergence of sexual liberation…

The lead character is a young Swedish girl who attempts to hold fast to her philosophy of nonviolence, free love, and democratic socialism... But the realities of her life force her to adopt new and unrestrained ideologies…

Strangely enough, in Sweden, it was criticized more for its left-wing attitudes than for its audacious display of sex

"Jag är nyfiken – Yellow" is a lot of fun. Like at least one other reviewer, I was, on numerous occasions, laughing out loud. Yellow is energetic, playful, self-aware, explorative. Don't expect Bergman here. This movie is about a youth in the early- to mid-60s in Sweden and about the issues, read *contradictions*, that the nation and the world were facing. At times Yellow appears to be an earnest social-political documentary, with Lena, the main character, and others interviewing both common people and politicians (e.g. Olaf Palme at home). At other times, Yellow seems to parody this kind of documentary. All the while, Yellow acts as a personal documentary exploring Lena's life - her home life, her loves, her political views, her view of herself. She is a complete person – complex, flawed, contradictory, happy, sad, curious. And placed over all of this is the wonderful additional dimension of the director, Sjöman, and his crew documenting themselves documenting Lena. It is this that, for me, really gives Yellow wings. Not only do they suddenly appear at some very funny times and in some funny ways, reminding the viewer that this is fiction and artifice, but their presence is itself another layer of the film; they are filming themselves filming themselves. I am reminded of a Bjork music video with this same quality – a music video about the making of a music video, ad infinitum, with each iteration getting weirder and more cartoonish. I think Sjöman may have had something similar in mind. While "Jag är nyfiken – Yellow" may not be everyone's cup of tea, it is certainly intelligent, witty, refreshing, ebullient, and authentic.

This movie caused a great sensation in 1969 because it was considered pornographic. The movie was not allowed to be shown in America. Finally, after a highly publicized court battle, the courts allowed the movie to appear and everybody went to see the movie. The movie was banned in many countries, not only in America, because is showed a man and a woman having sexual intercourse, the first time ever in a movie. However, in the actual scene, they climb a tree in a public park and have intercourse fully clothed in the branches of the tree. It takes the reader's imagination to understand what they are really doing. The content is so mild by today's standards that the movie is largely forgotten. However, it was because of the court precedent set by "I Am Curious (Yellow)" that we are allowed to see almost everything today. Sam Sloan

I grew up at a time when we were all experiencing things for the first time. We had heard about this film for a while and thought it would be interesting to see it. We were a mixed group and we guys were a little concerned about how the girls would react. As it turns out, the movie was more intellectually challenging than we had anticipated. We had a nice discussion at a coffee house afterwards. We were a little bit of an artsy bunch anyway. The nudity and sex weren't what we talked about (although it was a bit of an elephant in the room). We were trying to get a handle on what this girl was hoping for in life; what did she want from the world. I'm hoping to see this again soon and perhaps I'll do a little specific revision on the film. It certainly was news in the day. I found it bleak and rather depressing.

In the 1960s Sweden underwent an enormous social upheaval, which brought it from a rather rigidly stratified and staid society, which cinephiles might have seen in Ingmar Bergman's earliest films, to a place where the old sexual taboos collapsed and angry class war broke out just like in some other Western European countries. The Swedish filmmaker Vilgot Sjöman decided to reflect those changing mores (and possibly spur some further more-changing himself) with his pseudo-documentary project I AM CURIOUS. He developed a script through a great deal of improvisation and then shot enough footage to release it as two films: "Yellow" in 1967, and "Blue" the following year (these titles refer to the colours of the Swedish flag). This review treats both of them.

The main actress of these films was 22 year-old Lena Nyman who plays... Lena Nyman, a 22 year-old drama student already well into sexual exploration and political commitment. From the home she shares with her alcoholic father, she runs what she calls the Nyman Institute, keeping an enormous collection of files and wandering around Sweden with a microphone to record the reactions of Swedes to provocative questions like "Does Sweden have a class system?" and (to holidaymakers returning from fascist Spain) "What do you think about Franco?". She has tumultuous relationships, mainly sexual, with suave yuppie Börje (Börje Ahlstedt) and idealistic bohemian Hasse (Hans Hellberg). The films have another layer, however, where we see Vilgot Sjöman coaching his actors and establishing a sexual relationship with his lead actress -- but even this layer is fictional. One really admires everyone, director and his actors alike, for being able to play fictional versions of themselves at two different levels.

The two films have a yin-yang relationship, covering roughly the same themes but in different proportions. Yellow is more about political engagement and non-violence in the context of the Cold War, and it attacks the hypocrisy of the Swedish left (which had become entrenched and no longer a force for social change) and the monarchy. That film is set mainly in Stockholm and deals with Lena's home life. Blue, on the other hand, explores the themes of religion and the prison system, and more of it is set in the countryside where we hear some of the attitudes of rural Sweden as opposed to the capital.

Upon their release, these films (especially Yellow) were attacked as pornography, and Sjöman as a letch (even though it was the real-life Nyman's idea that there be a subplot where the director seduces his lead actress). However, the sex and nudity here is not titillating at all, rather it is simply one of the many sociocultural themes that Sjöman wanted to present and as unsexy as any real documentary. Furthermore, Sjöman was really no letch at all - among countercultural artists, he may have been ahead of his time in confronting the possibility that the new permissiveness wasn't just female liberation, it was also men finding it easier to coerce women into sex by accusing them of being uptight if they didn't put out, something which didn't occur to many 1960s idealists until the next decade. Another way in which Sjöman critically examines the New Left is by charting how those who preach non-violence could be very cruel in their interpersonal relationships with friends and family.

I had seen only Yellow a few times and was prepared to consider this only a four-star deal, highly interesting as documentary material about 1960s Sweden, but missing something that truly moved me. However, getting a DVD set and finally seeing Blue provided that moving experience; it is quite impressive how Sjöman made the two films interlock with just enough overlap to make it a convincing whole. There's also some latent humour that becomes clear only on seeing both.