Sweden,
1968, 100 min
Shown in 1968
CREDITS
- dir
-
Mai Zetterling
- prod
-
Göran Lindgren
- scr
-
Mai Zetterling, David Hughes
- cam
-
Rune Ericson
- cast
-
Bibi Anderson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, Erland Josephson, Stig Engstrom
- source
-
Sandrews
-
COMMENTS
Mai Zetterling, David Hughes in person.
OTHER
During a tour of the provinces, three actresses suddenly find themselves personally involved with separation of real and illusory experiences in their love affairs. Ironically, they are enacting the leading roles in Aristophanes' Lysistrata, so that they (and the film director) are able to express their views of mankind, love and war with double-edged witticism. Flickorna is a complex criticism of the ineptitude—perhaps, too, the injustice—of man's domination over women in guiding the world's current chaos. The theater tour provides Zetterling with the opportunity to use flashbacks from the ancient Greek setting of the play to the actresses' modern, private lives, and discordance in marriage is the basis for feminine outrage during this interplay. The structure of the film is ingenious and there are flights of surrealist fancy in Zetterling's observances of Sweden today and the problems of its women, when compared to Lysistrata's revolution of the fairer sex. This is the most "experimental" of Zetterling's films so far, and in the major roles, three of Sweden's most famous screen actresses thoroughly enjoy themselves in this smart comedy of anti-war manners. Some may consider the tragic undercurrent of Flickorna a much more poignant gesture on the part of Zetterling as writer: if ever the three heroines achieve an emancipatory breakthrough, the end of man's monopoly on human destiny is not in sight.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #109
Though the film had won two major awards at the Berlin Film Festival, John Cassavetes’ Love Streams was pulled from the SFIFF program at the last minute by the distributor. According to Cassavetes, MGM/UA was concerned that showing Streams, which the director himself proclaimed ’a crazy film,’ at the SFIFF might hurt the film’s box office upon wider release
