Harriet Andersson - Rumorstore search

Studio: New Yorker Films Video Release Date: 09/12/2006 Run time: 100 minutes

Mai Zetterling, revered as much for her acting as for her directing, directed The Girls, the film that defined her feminist sensibilities during Sweden's women's lib era. Tying contemporary gender issues to the ancient, The Girls tells the story of three actors, Liz Lindstrand (Bibi Andersson), Marianne (Harriet Andersson), and Gunnila (Gunnel Lindblom of The Hunger), who, to their husbands and lovers' dismay, take Aristophanes' play Lysistrata on the road, questioning, during the tour, how different their current lives really are. As all three women become increasingly rebellious against their familial and wifely duties, their relationships crumble until they start asking themselves if their rejection of domesticity is beside the point. Contextualized by Lysistrata, a play about female revolution set during a time when women had zero political rights, Liz, Marianne, and Gunnila begin to see the complexities of the women's movement, by understanding that they lack happiness not necessarily because they lack rights. By so clearly and stylishly elucidating this concept, Zetterling proves to be ahead of her time, making the film feel more relevant than ever. Filmed in high-contrast black and white like a great Bergman movie, The Girls looks intentionally sexy, further reiterating female power. --Trinie Dalton

In Stockholm, the fashion photographer Susanne Frank misses her married lover Henrik Lobelius that lives in Gothenburg with his wife and children, and the naive twenty years old model Doris has a troubled relationship with her boy friend Palle Palt. Susanne schedules a session of photo shoots in Gothenburg with Doris, and once there, she calls Henrik for an encounter. Meanwhile, Doris meets an elegant middle age gentleman on the street, the Consul Otto Sönderby, who buys expensive gifts for her: a dress, a pair of Italian gloves and valuable pearl necklace. They spend the afternoon together in an amusement park and later they go to Otto's mansion, where they are interrupted by his wicked daughter Marianne. Susanne has a love affair with Henrik in her room, but they are interrupted by his cynical wife. The incidents in these encounters affect their perspective of love. Written by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

"One of the most ambitious debuts since CITIZEN KANE." —Kenneth Tynan, The Observer

"Stunning, frank, bold and beautiful... Has much of the moods of Bergman (and) a Fellini-like fascination." —World Journal Tribune

"There is a degree of sexual openness about this picture that goes farther than most." —New York Post

For her feature film directing debut, actress Mai Zetterling turned to Agnes von Krusenstjerna’s controversial masterpiece of Swedish feminist literature, The Misses von Pahlen, an intense and personal 7-part novel has been likened to the great works of D.H. Lawrence.

As three pregnant women from different backgrounds wait to have their babies in a hospital in Stockholm at the outbreak of the Great War, they relive their childhood and youthful experiences via individual flashbacks.

Drawing on the classic Ingmar Bergman style of Swedish filmmaking and collaborating with many of his favorite actors as well as the great cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Zetterling has produced a powerful fusion of personal emotional drama and a commentary on the role of women in a society in moral decline.

Loving Couples gets presented as a naughty Scandinavian art film from the 1960s, but woe unto anyone who comes looking for titillation from this complex, sardonic, and often brutally frank film! The movie starts with three pregnant women in a hospital and flashes back to how each came to be there, culminating in a Midsummer celebration at a wealthy estate that--in its fluid visual style and scathing view of human relations--is reminiscent of Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game. "30 seconds of heaven for 30 years of hell," snaps an arrogant obstetrician; "Men always let you down," mutters a bitter wife in front of her young, wide-eyed daughter; "Marriage--it's like falling asleep for the rest of your life," muses Angela, the youngest and most innocent of the pregnant trio. Mai Zetterling's stunning directorial debut has been criticized as overly influenced by her countryman Ingmar Bergman, but though Zetterling shares many of Bergman's themes, she strips away his ponderous portentousness. Bergman's camera is like the eye of a disappointed God, coating everything with layer of bleak guilt. Zetterling feels her characters' struggles are their own business; she watches them with a skeptical empathy, melancholy but tinged with hope. A rich, rewarding, and unjustly neglected film. This dvd release also includes Zetterling's outstanding 15-minute short film The War Game. --Bret Fetzer

Ingmar Bergman's gloomy but incisive 1961 classic about a woman's descent into madness--and the inability of her family to mitigate her pain with love--is still a stunning work. Harriet Andersson plays Karin, a psychiatric patient newly released from a hospital and staying in the island home where she found some measure of security in childhood. Instead of getting on her feet, however, Karin begins disintegrating after realizing she no longer loves her physician husband (Max von Sydow) and is being rather coldly observed by her writer father (Gunnar Bjornstrand), whose distant fascination with her plight is recorded in his daily journal. Hearing voices, believing God to be a spider, and pursuing an incestuous relationship with her brother, Karin slips into an inexorable decline, objectively witnessed by those too emotionally frozen to help. The first of Bergman's trilogy on themes of faith and isolation (the other entries being Winter Light and The Silence), Through a Glass Darkly finds the legendary Swedish filmmaker at an artistic and philosophical peak. --Tom Keogh

Released in 1953, Monika, an early Ingmar Bergman-directed melodrama, did much to establish the reputation of Swedish cinema, and perhaps Swedish women in general, as leading the vanguard in sexual liberation. The film attracted the wrath of the censors and one scene of lovemaking had to be cut. While subsequent generations will look at the film and wonder whatever the fuss was about, it retains a vivid and frolicsome sensuality, before submitting to the inevitable Bergman bleakness.

The film tells the story of a young couple, Harry (Lars Ekborg) and Monika (18-year-old Harriet Andersson, with whom Bergman would fall in love), stuck in lousy jobs in Stockholm. Harry is beset by parental responsibility--his mother died young and his father is ill--while Monika is fed up with her drunken, violent father. They escape in a motorboat to spend a blissful summer on an island in the archipelago. Once Monika gets pregnant and they're forced to steal food, however, the idyll concludes and they return to Stockholm, where the relationship disintegrates. Visually ravishing, Monika would have a deep impact on French New Wave cinema. --David Stubbs

This masterful early Bergman (Autumn Sonata, Cries and Whispers) film is the second installment in a "shrewdly ironic, lewdly hilarious trilogy" (Time). Along with A Lesson in Love and Smiles of a Summer Night, Dream