Nattlek
Sweden,
1966, 90 min
Shown in 1966
CREDITS
- dir
-
Mai Zetterling
- prod
-
Göran Lindgren
- scr
-
Mai Zetterling, David Hughes
- cam
-
Rune Ericson
- editor
-
Paul Davies
- mus
-
Jan Johansson, Georg Riedel
- cast
-
Ingrid Thulin, Keve Hjelm, Jörgen Lindström, Lena Brundin, Naima Wifstrand, Rune Lindström, Monica Zetterlund, Christian Bratt
- source
-
Mondial Films
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Mai Zetterling in person.
OTHER
A cinematic milestone in the development of psychological themes, Night Games has been the controversial center of attention at the Venice Film Festival and in our own surroundings. Adapted by Mai Zetterling from her own novel, the film describes a wealthy young man's struggle to free himself from the psychosexual damage of his beautiful mother's demoralized philosophies, and the influence of her exceptionally decadent associates. Accompanied by his fiancée, he returns to the rural castle where he had grown up, reliving through memory the interplay of love and revulsion he had experienced with his mother and a deranged old aunt. Zetterling avoids clichés and boldly utilizes the cinema as an instrument of impersonal but poetic observation. The flashbacks are permeated with a child's numbed, fascinated view of exotic charades where grownups cavort and festoon themselves like evil spirits. In her perusal of senseless immoralities and jaded pleasure, Zetterling does not turn the eye of the camera away, but keeps it firmly centered upon every nuance of frustration, regret and flickering hope. The result is a masterwork of introspection, totally alive and ultimately moving. For those who have known the work of Chaucer, Proust and more recently, James Purdy, it is obvious that Night Games is a moral fable of cinema. The human spirit can triumph over evil only after experiencing it, and this is exactly the sort of film that must be seen in this rich, tragic land of averted glances.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #125
According to the November 29, 1959 San Diego Union, The Village on the River was the first Dutch feature ever shown in the U.S. (at the Third San Francisco International Film Festival).
