"You shall not spread VD, give birth to unwanted kids, or commit rape. Practice birth control - there are far too many babies being born. Otherwise, you may engage freely in sexual intercourse, masturbation, pornography, everything your animal nature might suggest to you."
What a ... curious film. If you've heard of its notoriety, I suggest going into it thinking of it as a film about 1960's sociopolitical concerns with a few unabashed scenes of nudity, rather than as a sex film that was so scandalous it was branded as pornographic and involved in legal cases that went to the Supreme Court. Expectations are so important. Don't watch this film looking for eroticism.
Quite a bit of I Am Curious (Yellow) is concerned with the issues of the day, as a liberal young woman (Lena Nyman) questions people in Stockholm about the class system, the unfairness in pay to women and rural workers, the nonviolence movement, conscientious objectors to the military, acts of civil disobedience such as sabotage or not paying taxes, and the obsolescence of the monarchy. It's all unscripted and organic, and I found it interesting to hear the rather moderate reactions that ranged from apathy to pragmatism, e.g. As to whether the class system should be abolished, several saying that no, some amount of income disparity should exist based on talent and effort in life, or young men defending why they wouldn't dodge the draft. Regardless of where you stand exactly on those things, to me there is incredible relevance to signs like "Message to humanity: Down with the privileged classes all over the world" and how they speak to the unfairness in the system all the way up to the present day.
We also hear Sartre's commentary about Vietnam, suggesting the tribunal apply the Nuremberg convictions to the war crimes in Vietnam, and demonstrations against America being in Vietnam. We see trips to Spain and Portugal boycotted because of Franco and Salazar's fascism, and to the film's credit, also picketing of the Chinese and Russian embassies with signs reading "Communism without death camps" and "Socialism without tyranny." There are also brief interviews with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And future Swedish Prime Minister (then Minister of Transportation) Olof Palme.
The film doesn't produce profound revelations about all these issues, but I admired its main character and who she represented for getting out there and getting involved to try to change things in the world. As she and others train in nonviolent responses to the scenario where Sweden has been invaded, they're criticized by a local reporter as looking like a "scout camp rather than real war," to which one of them calmly says that conventional military training may remind one of "playing cowboys and Indians." He might have added that if we don't try to adopt different outlooks and make progress, how can we hope to avoid the same historical patterns that have led to such suffering in the world? Anyway, to me the film as a whole represented a little time capsule of liberal/radical thought in the 60's, while still presenting enough of the shades of grey to be thought provoking.
About 80 minutes in to the film we get to the parts that had puritans all aflutter. Despite her liberal views, the young woman in the film has a conservative lover (Börje Ahlstedt), but instead of their differing outlooks causing problems between them, it's something much more conventional - he's got another woman. She leaves him for a retreat of sorts and tries to purify her soul. There is a string of topless moments as she mediates, drinks from a stream, eats just a few berries for lunch, lies on a bed of nails, reads a book on sex positions, and tries to do yoga. When her lover tracks her down, we briefly see the setup to cunnilingus, and then a cutaway to the aftermath of sex with her gently kissing his flaccid penis a couple of times. It's not erotic but daring, and it's interesting to think about why it was so daring, and why it should have been so shocking. Just the suggestion of oral sex, or of showing the male body was apparently enough.
The film's emphasis is on the naturalism of nudity and sex, for example, spending its time in an earlier scene on awkward undressing and the couple holding one another. There's something refreshing about this, particularly as compared to the kinds of glamorized sex scenes usually seen in cinema ranging from the conventional to porn. In one of the extended sequences of nudity later in the film, both male and female, we see them in a horrible argument, and in another, them being rather unceremoniously scrubbed down as part of a treatment against an STD they've developed. A part of the film seems to be showing the body and challenging those who would be offended by it and not by grisly scenes of violence in other films, and another part of the film seems to be showing that despite the sexual revolution, emotions are involved and diseases exist. Free love has its pitfalls.
What kept me from liking the film more was the meta presence of director Vilgot Sjöman and his crew, who are making the movie we're seeing. I'm not sure what the point of that was, as it didn't seem to add anything to what the film was trying to say, and was more self-indulgent and jarring than anything else. There were a couple of times he lamely attempts comedy, such as a news person coming onto a screen after a naked embrace and saying "The bad reception on your screen was due to erection failure," or after the woman saying she's had 23 lovers in her life, the film cutting away to a man counting his fingers and then the words "Did she say 23?" The latter undercut the message of sexual equality and was unfortunate. Last, Sjöman was also rather creepy while fondling his assistants who are a couple of decades younger, and it's not clear he was self-aware of this.
Overall though, an interesting window into the 1960's.
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