Conjugal violence has often been treated in the movies; the Hollywoodian style of "sleeping with my enemy" starring Julia Roberts and " enough" starring Jennifer Lopez were not that much convincing ,gambling on the show and on turning the viewer into a voyeur .
"Den man älskar" avoids this trap : all one sees is photographs of the beaten wife taken at the hospital ,and the bedridden victim .
Anti-Hollywoodian to the core, the film may turn off some viewers ; after she's found comfort and true love again with another good man, the heroine ,helped by the police,keeps her torturer at bay ...for a while ...
But ,relatively speaking, the heroine looks sometimes like Charlotte Rampling in "portiere di notti" (Liliana Cavani , 1973) : a former prisoner of a concentration camp fascinated by her nazi hangman (Dirk Bogarde) she meets again in Vienna ,sexually attracted to him .
That's what happens to the heroine:in spite of her new husband's love and affection , she cannot help but being slowly but inexorably attracted by her former flame ;this may infuriate some viewers , in spite of the "moral" ending -perhaps imposed by the producers- The viewer does not leave the movie unharmed : he feels as uneasy as the bewildered husband walking in the graveyard ; the movie is a long flashback .
The question is : is it really a plea against beaten wives? Although interesting ,for that matter, the movie remains an ambiguous statement.
