Movie Review: Maid in Sweden

No, this is not the arthouse import source material for Maid in Manhattan, but another 70's Christina Lindberg flick. After watching Anita: Swedish Nympette, I became convinced that there just might be a genuinely good movie in Lindberg's oeuvre. If there is, Maid in Sweden is definitely not it. On the whole, this movie is uneven, imbalanced, schizophrenic even.

At the beginning, the movie feels like The Mary Tyler Moore Show: Inga is headed to the big city to spend time with her sister, and the upbeat 70s pop soundtrack makes us feel like she might just make it after all. For a while, the soundtrack is so upbeat and so prominent that you might also think you're watching The Monkees, but then all that kitschy uptempo stuff gets wiped away because Inga's train ride goes overnight, which means she has to strip and get ready for bed, and, of course, the tits come out, which is great, but jarring. And there's a voyeur who happens to see her around her door curtain and just can't help but stop to look. (Could you?)

The movie has some things to recommend it. First, the director knew how to really show off Lindberg's tits. They get ample screen time, they're wonderfully lit, and we see them from many great angles. We see them when she's standing, lying down, sitting still, or in motion. There's even one really great slow-motion sequence when Inga's taking a shower that is not primarily prurient, nor is it exclusively erotic: it's aesthetic, artistic, very much like the way some directors and cinematographers will embrace the scenery so that your heart swells because it is filled with beauty. The sequence has a Grecian urn purity: beautiful tits are truth, and truth, beautiful tits is all it says.

The other thing the movie has to recommend it is its (seemingly obligatory) masturbation scene. Where most of the sex in the movie is mechanical and bland, this scene stands out as superb, natural. Lindberg makes sweet, almost spiritual self-love. She masturbates in a way that shows it as a self-fulfilling act deriving from a rich interior life that is part dream, part fantasy, and part soul. Lindberg is probably the greatest masturbatrix ever captured on film. Other sequences are definitely more graphic and more arousing, but none of them are as subtle or as textured as the ones I have seen Lindberg perform.

I wish the above-mentioned sequences could be put into a better movie, because, unfortunately the movie's negatives outweigh its positives. The number one thing that disrecommends this movie is rape. Rape is a staple element in exploitation films, of course, but partly because of its uneven tone the use of rape in this movie really bothered me. Date rape, gang rape, and a near-rape by Inga's sister's boyfriend (for which Inga is blamed) all take place with Inga coming to enjoy them after initial resisting. She even becomes the girlfriend of the date-raper. This comes together to create an atmosphere in which sexual violence against women is condoned and in which "no" never really means "no," which I found troublesome and diminished my enjoyment of the rest of the movie.

Another problem is that the movie tries to establish an inner life for the characters, but does so very poorly. It's very hard to determine what is real, what is memory, and what is dream, which contributes to the movie's narrative problem. You don't expect tight plotting in an exploitation flick, but this one is particularly bad, so that the meandering jumble of events comes to an unspectacular and unfulfilling end.