Cinema
New women
Ted Whitehead
Summer Paradise (Paris Pullman) Black and White in Colour (Scene, Leicester Square) Summer Paradise (AA) is a novelty: a Swedish film criticising women for their failure to play the traditional maternal role. If the setting, a lush retreat on the archipelago, is paradisiac, the experience is a midsummer nightmare, as four generations of a family gather for their vacation and each one demonstrates the dread effects of increasing permissiveness.
The film is largely occupied by and with women. The oldest is the mother, traditional, dignified but cowed. The middleaged are represented by the daughter, Katha, a divorcee who has devoted her life to her work as a doctor, and Emma, a social worker surviving on Nembutal and disillusion, the sort of character drawn to social work like an arsonist to the fire service. Katha has two daughters representing the new woman in contrasting styles: Sassa, liberated, fun-loving, and bisexual, with a daughter by a long-forgotten man, and Annika, torn between motherhood and career, and also between her love for her husband and her jealousy over his philandering. (How significant that philanderer, lover of men, should have come to mean a man who fancies women, so that there's no neutral word for a woman who fancies men, as if the latter were unthinkable.) And there's Sassa's Lesbian love, Ingrid, a possessive neurotice who also has a child by a long-forgotten father.
The children are the victims of these new-wave parents. Sassa neglects her daughter, who is lost in her infatuation with Ingrid's son, a psychopath who summons spaceships to land and obliterates the entire family gathering. Annika is accused of abandoning her children to the kindergarten while she goes off to work. And there's Katha's brother, who dumps his son Tomas on the family before setting off with his wife to the Riviera. Tomas kills himself.
It's clear, however, that the accused are not the men — patriarchal old father, gentle young lover, vacillating husband — who are indulgently presented as overgrown children, with only a peripheral responsibility in family matters. It's these self-centred, hedonistic young women, the sort who insist on smoking during pregnancy, and refuse to immolate themselves on the altar of motherhood.
The film is produced by Ingmar Bergman and directed by Gunnel Lindblom, who has spent many years working with him both as film actress and theatre assistant. It was prompted by a group of Miss Lindblom's friends, who wanted to act together under her direction; and the result is a brilliant example of ensemble performance. But the dialogue is lumpy with lines like, 'You exchange one security for another all through life,' and the didactic intentions are so transparent that it's like watching a soap opera version of the old Bowlby theories of maternal deprivation. The extended family has gone, the nuclear family is going, the future is nightmare. A dip into Levi Strauss might reassure the director about the range of human possibilities. Puzzlingly, she says that she was drawn to the subject for two reasons: 'because we have concentrated too much on freedom for women' and 'because all the major roles are for women'. None of the actresses is related to the children in the movie; I suppose their own children were at the kindergarten.
The targets of Black and White in Colour (A) — imperialism, militarism, patriotism, racism — are even more familiar, but they are attacked with such wit and subtlety that the film is a delight from its beginning to its ironical end. Set in 1915 in Africa, on the Ivory Coast, it concerns two tiny colonies, one French, one German, dreaming away their torpid but comfortable lives with the occasional stimulus of cheap booze and easy sex. Then the French discover that their country is at war with Germany, and lethargy gives way to lunacy as they lead a troop of blacks — whom they have conned into service — against the Huns.
It would be a pity to reveal more of the plot — enough to say that the director maintains the jaunty, comic, bitter tone with never a false note, and the film thoroughly deserves its Academy Award as best foreign language film of 1977.
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