The film is set in the Danish provincial town of Nybro, though it opens and closes in Copenhagen. It is 1913 and the Danes smell war in the air - though they are uncertain whether it will involve them or not.
The film falls very oddly between being a not-very-interesting sex-comedy (all the women seem anxious to get laid, but we see very little except copious lingerie from any of them) and a much more intriguing montage of village life reacting to imminent war with a mixture of confusion and indifference.
One could certainly watch the film without any attention to the erotic element. Sytten contains one of the few accurate loss-of-virginity scenes before Catherine Breillat, but all the rest of the porn is so anodyne as to be tedious. The photography of Nybro is lovingly attentive to detail though, and the attempt to capture belle epoque class certainty and political confusion if genuinely thought provoking.
I thought this was a very good film, though I can see why it will disappoint almost everyone who watches it. The erotic content is either silly or annoyingly accurate (the people who watch erotic films seldom have any interest in real sex) but it certainly gets in the way of the rather unusual gentle nostalgia which should have been the film's forte.
The other films I've seen from Anneliese Meineche were all just as confused.
