The Girls

'Flickorna' (the English title is 'The Girls'), made in 1968, was probably the most ambitious film in the directorial career of Mai Zetterling, a personality of Swedish cinema that I discovered while watching this film. Mai launched herself as an actress and had quite a bit of success in Sweden as well as in England and the United States, but when she was approaching the age of 40 she decided to abandon acting and go behind the camera as a director. She would return to acting towards the end of her life to confront Anjelica Houston in 'The Witches'. 'Flickorna' was her third film, a very interesting but also very controversial production, both for its unusual format and for its declared political, pacifist and feminist content. We can say that it is a manifesto expressed through refined artistic means. The reception was mixed, the audience and some critics turned their backs on the film, and Mai Zetterling did not direct anything for almost ten years. I liked the film, especially because it seems to me to have become terribly topical again.

The main heroines of the film are three actresses who go on tour in remote regions of Sweden with a performance of Aristophanes' 'Lysistrata'. They are three mature women, each facing their own problems in their personal lives. Liz's marriage is on the verge of falling apart because of her husband, who already has a mistress and is looking for ways to get out of the relationship. Marianne is a single mother who is forced to take her baby to rehearsals and on tour, entrusting him to the care of babysitters. Gunilla already has four children, whom she leaves during the tour in the care of her husband, who is not too happy about the situation. Their experiences intertwine with the feminist and pacifist text and message of the classic comedy, which is used to convey women's feelings, but also their ideology. But is this form of engaged theater relevant and effective? Liz's attempt to engage the audience in a discussion about the meaning of the play after the performance is a failure.

The film is made in 1968, a turning point and perhaps the most revolutionary year of the Cold War - the year of the student uprisings in Paris, the protests against the Vietnam War in the USA and the Prague Spring and its crushing by the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet tanks. Mai Zetterling was part of Ingmar Bergman's circle of collaborators and friends, but her art is much more explicitly committed to feminist and pacifist ideologies. The three actresses who play the main roles - Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom - were also among Bergman's collaborators in theatre and film. I really liked the way personal problems are combined with political messages, the theatre in the film alternating the lines on stage with sequences from the lives of the protagonists. Aristophanes' text remains relevant to this day and will continue to resonate with viewers as long as women's equality in rights and opportunities is not fully achieved and as long as wars continue to be decided and fought by men. The questions that 'Flickorna' asks about the place of women in society, about the power of art and the influence of culture in politics and about peace as an alternative to the endless chain of wars and violence are brought to the screen in an elegant manner and seem painfully relevant today more than ever.

I was prompted to write a little bit about this film because i think the other review on this page is absolutely ridiculous. And, as this is a rather obscure film, i didn't want that to be the only word on this great film.

I just want to say that from the way this film tells it's story right on through the way it is performed and on to what it ultimately says not only HOLDS UP through time, it is most definitely relevant in today's gender climate. I was absolutely blown away by the ballsy film-making and the fearless way in which it presents its ideas. Very much ahead of it's time.

Everyone should see this film, especially men. and of all men, especially men who think and write like the other reviewer on this page. SEE THIS MOVIE!

I believe this movie represents how it felt to be an out-spoken feminist in the 60s. The people you were preaching to weren't listening, the people you were preaching against were laughing of you. It must have been a terrible struggle, and this movie portrays this in an interesting manner.

However, while feminism movement is still going strong (and rightfully so), this movie does not hold up as that relevant any more. The feminist struggle was different back then than now, and while some of the problems are the same, the "war" (as they call it in the film) is different, making this movie feel as dated as it is.

The highlights of the movie are some of the surreal scenes. I believe this is the only movie with a chase scene where a snowmobile is chasing a kicksled.

So, I would say watch this if you are interested in either feminism in cinema, or the situation of the feminists in the 60s and 70s. Or if you are interested in (swedish) film history, as this release caused some controversy. But if you are a casual moviegoer that (amazingly) stumbles upon this, you probably will not be too happy.

"That's why we called a meeting of all women. We can wait no longer. Now you have to listen to us. It's our turn to talk. It's your turn to listen, just as we've had to listen in the past."

In 1968, with the world teetering on the edge of madness, Mai Zetterling makes a plea for women to stand up for themselves and start changing the world, not putting up with the status quo or their subordinate positions any longer. The premise has three women travelling as part of a theater troupe to put on a performance of Lysistrata, Aristophanes' play about women who organize to withhold sex in the attempt to get men to stop waging the Peloponnesian War, which is a perfect parallel. Zetterling interweaves the real world for these women with personal memories, fantastical daydreams, and occasional mind-reading to create a delirious blend of visual images and powerful satire.

If it's not already obvious, we see woman's perspective in many ways, but often relating to the bad behavior of men. For the two women who are married, one of their husbands immediately rings up two lovers the moment his wife leaves town, and both men have old-fashioned, condescending views about their wives working in the first place. The unmarried woman in the troupe is having an affair with a married man who makes empty promises to end things with his wife. These men all have a big laugh and yuck it up over the things the women are trying to express in the play and offstage. Meanwhile, younger men make crude comments about their bodies as the enter a restaurant, and other men aggressively try to pick them up. All of that may sound heavy-handed, but it was delivered artistically, and rang true.

Another element of this perspective is simply the presence of a crying baby, which I found refreshing given how big a part of real life this is, and how little we see it in movies. The burden of child rearing, especially when it's assumed to be the woman's priority, is well represented here, even if it doesn't make up a lot of the runtime.

There is also a fair bit of criticism about women as well, those who are too complacent or too satisfied to let others decide things in the world. In one scene where Zetterling wanders into the minds of her characters, Lysistrata (er, Liz, get it?) meets a bourgeois couple in the small northern town who agree to have dinner with her. The husband's thoughts gravitate towards her appearance like a compass needle finding north, and the wife's vary between confusion over her visitor's deep thoughts and annoyance at comments she thinks are too personal. In another moment, after a performance, Liz asks the audience to stay and discuss the play and how it relates to real life at a deeper level, but they only stare at her, dumbfounded, men and women included. "Don't you understand that it's we who make the world what it is?" she shouts to awkward silence. We also see the women break out into a fight amongst themselves, a nice little acknowledgment that peace and harmony is not necessarily a consequence of female empowerment.

If it all sounds like 'too much,' there are many wonderfully surreal moments here which helped keep the feeling of this 'message' film relatively light. One example is Liz imagining herself stripping while trying to answer reporter's questions about her behavior, showing the feelings of her vulnerability and how it's only then that men begin to show genuine interest in what she's doing. In another hilarious moment, the husband unpacks his lovers out of a large standing trunk he's brought them to the hotel in, undressing them calmly and tucking them into bed while calmly denying their existence. There are many others. It's all rendered beautifully by the black and white cinematography from Rune Ericson, and this has a very deep cast, including Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, Gunnar Björnstrand, and Erland Josephson, all of whom are strong here. Just a great film, still relevant today, and very entertaining.

Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, and Gunnel Lindblom go on tour with LYSISTRATA and become radicalized into political agency by the play and the reactions -- or lack of reactions -- to it.

Mai Zetterling's film disappeared from the theaters after three weeks of awful receipts. The critics -- men, of course -- didn't care for this tale of how these women's real lives bonded with their stage lives to create a third life, part dream, part hallucination, with the men reduced to indistinguishable, impotent actors driven simply by their lusts for sex and dull normality.

The movie has gained respect over the years, with feminists acclaiming it. But were the critics of the time so wrong? Aristophanes' play has often often attracted the attention of modern writers and producers. They've made modern-dress novels, and plays and movies, and they seem to have a uniformly poor reception. Perhaps the attraction of the source material to Ms Zetterling was it was one of the few works of classic literature in which women had agency. Whereas Aristophanes intended this as mockery of the new, more democratic spirit of Athens that he so despised, offering peace as so obvious that even women could see it, and men being such brutes that they'd do anything for sexual release. He was not making an argument for extending the franchise to women; he wanted a return to the Good Old Days, when aristocrats with names like Aristophanes were in charge.

Perhaps the failing here is Ms Zetterling's honesty. Like Spike Jones, in his gloss on the play, CHI-RAQ, she points out the hypocrisy of the class she argues for, their cowardice in refusing to accept responsibility. That's one of the risks of satire. Once you've offended everyone, there aren't going to be many fans.