Flickorna, Mai Zetterling, 1968

This has like all my favourite actors

This is gonna be brilliant!

The end.

OK OK OK, the plot here is very simple. A theatre troupe puts in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata in the districts, and the play and reality meld together kinda.

But wow! This is brilliant! It’s like post Nouvelle Vague, Post Realism, Post Bergman, Post Everything. It’s totally new! Amazeballs!

I was riveted to the sofa the entire time! It’s like so weird – I’ve seen nothing like it (but I mean, there are obviously parallels to French and British late 60’s Cinema).

It’s gorgeously shot and strangely lit. It shifts between kinda semi Natural Lighting to Over Exposure Lighting in a hypnotic way. I was wondering whether Zetterling was using Infrared Film at one point but I think not?

Andersson, Andersson and Lindblom are totally amazing here, it’s just one iconic shot after another.

But I mean, it’s not perfect, two thirds of the movie in, the pacing gets a bit erratic.

Let my try my hand at a translation. “The film met harsh criticism and disappeared from the Stockholm cinema after three and a half weeks. ‘Such deranged menstruations!’, Bo Strömstedt of the Express newspaper commented.”

Fuck you, Bo Strömstedt.

Fuck you.