Star Review
In 1966, director Vilgot Sjöman went to his producer and asked for 100,000 metres of black and white film and total freedom to make a film without a script. He got it, and made a film portrait of Sweden in 1967 – two in fact, I am Curious - Yellow and I am Curious - Blue (the colours signifying the Swedish flag) being companion films of the same story. Three years later, after Yellow had been seized by US customs and declared ‘obscene’ by a number of states, the film ended up in the American Supreme Court in ‘A motion picture named I Am Curious – Yellow versus the United States Government’ (“that was the peak of my career as a moral informer” says Sjöman). By that stage however the outrage from the self-appointed moral guardians of the time had resulted in the film taking over $8m at the US box office. After the Supreme Court decreed that it was ‘not utterly without redeeming social value’, thereby becoming a landmark test case against the US obscenity laws, it eventually took over $20m there.
Just what was so incendiary about the film? Applying the word ‘obscene’ to it is now laughable. There’s nudity of both sexes certainly, along with sex scenes that – because Sjöman wished to portray them as un-clichéd, resulting in them being shown in all their fumbling, inelegant glory – come across as both tender, passionate and honest. They were in fact the main cause of I am Curious - Yellow being banned, though I suspect the film’s free mixture of sex and politics, its sloganeering against violence and America’s involvement in Vietnam among other things, and the fact that the main character openly experimenting with sexual freedom was a woman, made it an uncomfortable harbinger for some at the time.
The film is in fact dominated by Lena Nyman’s performance as the young drama student, which is by turns warm and ferocious, brave, funny and always engaging. Her role is to question everything from the state of socialism in Sweden to the conditions necessary for sexual equality. It is an iconic performance of fledgeling independence that is refreshingly candid and also very much in the spirit of a time of questioning accepted standards and hierarchies. Yellow has a nice spirit of mischief too. There are collaged interviews with Martin Luther King and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a spoof ‘Support the Swedish Atom Bomb’ collection for pennies on a Stockholm street, and an interview with then communications minister Olof Palme in which Sjöman is distracted from listening by the sight of Lena’s legs.
Obviously influenced by Godard in its use of slogans and onscreen text, it is also one of the best films about filmmaking and the voyeurism implicit in its process. It lays bare the mechanics of filmmaking with disconcerting cuts from moments of extreme emotion to the crew filming them or simply waiting around. At one stage, the crew show off various yoga poses that Lena is trying to master on her retreat. It’s also about power relationships in film. At the beginning we see the director and his star canoodling in a lift. Lena then chooses a male lead, Börje, so she can play a love scene with him (“Who is using whom?” says Sjöman to Lena) which leads to jealousy between the director and the lead, apparent in the scenes where we see Sjöman editing the film. The director has the final cut though and gives his leads their comeuppance after deciding that their love scene must have ‘consequences’. Börje and Lena may go off with each other at the end; a director can always find another pretty young drama student anyway.
It’s an idealistic film too that comes from the closeness of its small crew and the youth of its performers. As part of her campaign against hypocrisy in all its forms, Lena forms the ‘Nymans Institut’ and drafts a course in non-violent resistance (sabotage, non-cooperation, fraternisation) which the Swedish state then adopts, offering lessons to its citizens. At the end of Yellow, and appropriately for a film that was at the vanguard of major changes in what could be depicted and how, Lena clears out all the clutter of her room to start anew.
I am Curious – Blue is Yellow’s companion – ‘the same film with different material’ according to Sjöman, though it feels instead as if it plays a supporting role to the other film rather than being its equal partner, filling in its back story, coming at it from another angle. It again tells the story of Börje, Lena and Vilgot making a film, but this time takes in questions of religion and prison that featured less prominently in Yellow. As in that film it looks at the possibility of a truly non-violent stance of resistance given people’s nature, and again sees Lena questioning – interviewing people about disparity of income, about social democracy in Sweden, and joining a women’s group discussion on attaining sexual satisfaction. Like Yellow too, there is a feeling of the film trying to find where the new boundaries lie in society, as well as trying to lay down some idealistic new guidelines. Lena’s efforts at this in Yellow weren’t fully appreciated or understood by some, she received some wholly unpleasant ‘fan mail’, which is read and shown on screen in Blue. She is called a ‘whore’ and one boy’s group even goes so far as to ask Sjöman if they can hire her from him for a night – which just goes to show why a didactic, and very moral film like I am Curious was, and in many ways still is, necessary.
Anyway, here’s to Lena. Earnest, headstrong, innocent, bemused, honest, curious Lena.
Graeme Hobbs on 15th August 2006
View all 230 of Graeme Hobbs’s reviews
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I Am Curious Yellow / I Am Curious Blue
