The girls

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Movie
German title The girls
Original title Flickorna
Country of production Sweden
original language Swedish
Publishing year 1968
length 100 minutes
Rod
Director May butterfly
script May Zetterling, David Hughes
music Michael Hurd
camera Rune Ericson
cut Wic Kjellin
occupation

In Die Mädchen ( Flickorna ) from 1968, her fourth feature film, the Swedish filmmaker Mai Zetterling examined the status of female emancipation.

Gender war on several levels of reality

The film focuses on three stage actresses in their mid-thirties: Liz is childless married to a stock exchange trader, Gunilla has several children with her husband and Marianne has an illegitimate child and an otherwise married lover, an elderly doctor. The three girls belong to a theater group that is performing the ancient play Lysistrata by Aristophanes on a tour through Sweden, including in northern Kiruna . However, the film does not have a developing plot. Rather, the narrative constantly alternates between reality, the play performed and the fantasies and paintings of the three women. “Everything mixes up in their heads and in the film.” Often there are no references to the chronology of individual scenes. Richard Henshaw (1972) found the work "too confusing to understand, and the film had trouble drawing the viewer in." In the second half of the film, the phantasms are given even more space than in the first; the dividing line between female and male runs unbroken through all levels.

The Lysistrata play is about the women of two warring ancient Greek cities who are fed up with their husbands' warfare and their frequent absence and who want to force the men to peace with a sex strike. The life of the three reflects situations from the play. Thérèse Giraud (1976) interpreted the film to mean that everything that happens takes place in the head of the three women. Liz imagines that as soon as she has told her husband that she is going on tour, he calls another woman to meet her and on the call expresses his conviction that Liz does not know anything about it. Marianne shows up late for rehearsals because she had to look after her child. The director accuses her of not having memorized the text. The line of dialogue can be heard: “Don't you all long for your husbands?” The “war” in which men find themselves is the world of work that keeps them away from housework and raising children.

Often the flow of images and the soundtrack are decoupled. For example, the sound anticipates events that can only be seen with a delay. Marianne is rummaging in the perfumery department of a department store when the screaming of a baby can be heard on the soundtrack. Driven by maternal instincts, she runs out and through half the city to her apartment. There she finds her child well protected by the nanny. A visitor snores at one of the performances. This is followed by a cut to Liz, who thinks of a local married couple - you can hear their voices - who had previously assured her that they "absolutely liked" the piece. Then Liz sees the entire audience snoring.

After the curtain has lowered after a performance in Kiruna, Liz steps in front of it again and asks the audience, who have already risen, to stay. She would like to enter into a dialogue with them and find out what the piece triggered for them. The audience remains completely silent and just waits for what she will say next. She accuses them. “You're sitting there like a stuffed thing.” A colleague ends the messy situation with a casual slogan. Giraud called this audience an “always polite, always indifferent” that the call was part of the spectacle, something that happens in the theater but not in life. The evening is continued in the foyer, where a reporter asks Liz: “What do you ask of an audience who wants a nice evening at the theater?” The colleagues also keep their distance from her. On the onward journey in the minibus, intercuts show that they would rather be out and about in a Mercedes or on skis (the male colleagues), in a canoe (Marianne) or on a Vespa (Gunilla). Finally, Liz sits alone in the bus.

The three women apply the procedure of their Lysistrata figures to their own lives. In doing so, they expand the concept of war to include contemporary behavior: They want to “create awareness”, lead discussions and practice satire on the “oppressors” in role-playing games. In the busy foyer, Liz suddenly does an unexpected striptease. Suddenly her husband is in the audience, she stands in front of him and takes off her bra in front of the shocked husband. A recut shows a stage scene in which the women physically attack the men. "A fight against war for peace."

A scene in which the levels of reality intertwine and the protagonist's will remains in the dark takes place in the bed department of a department store: Marianne and her lover are unabashedly lying in love positions to try out different models. The sellers talk unimpressed about the wood and the mattress material, the prices and the VAT. Above this are the voices of the women in the play who take the oath: "I will not stretch my legs to the sky." Then Marianne cries with her lover lying on top of her, and it remains to be seen whether she will be raped or whether it is her Refraining from sex is so difficult. The scene when Gunilla picks up her husband at the train station moves on the dividing line between reality and imagination. She recites from the piece, which confuses him: "Actors are constantly quoting lines, they confuse theater and reality." But he promptly performs a juggler's play and the passengers, who have turned into an "audience", give him applause. Gunilla complains: "He should be interested in me." He puts her over his knee and receives further applause. Giraud called the film "a sequence of images that go off in all directions, that jostle and seek."

In a surrealistic sequence, the spouses and lovers laugh together at the emancipatory aspirations of women. Pallbearers with top hats in a procession transfer Liz, who has been laid out, to the sounds of a marching band. One speaker speaks of a “joyful ceremony”, now “we are free men again”, the women have finally given up. He complains: “They began to speak and have their own opinion.” Giraud: “Three girls in search of their own images against those that men put in front of them every day. It is not easy to break away from it (...). Find his true desires again and first sweep away the wrong ones. ”Liz gets out of the coffin and continues the fight with her warriors.

When they appear on television, the three are framed, included in the television picture, but instead of answering the questions asked, they choose a liberating laugh. The men sit in front of the screen and say that the women are "silly things" that are incapable of being serious. Liz's husband sends a friend over to convince her to cancel the tour and come home. “His work is important, he needs your support.” He needs a “representative woman” to entertain his guests. When Liz holds up her own work, he asks her, "Honestly, is your job that important?"

Liz, Gunilla and Marianne put their husbands' photos next to each other. The series fades seamlessly to the portraits of contemporary heads of state and military figures such as Khrushchev , Johnson , Nasser , Mao , Dajan and de Gaulle , and finally to the historical leaders Stalin , Hitler and Mussolini . Again as moving images, the Wehrmacht and other armies march . The historical footage is shown in a movie theater full of women throwing tomatoes , eggs and cakes onto the screen. Giraud suspected that the composition of the rulers with their undifferentiated ranks of dictators and de Gaulle could be perceived as scandalous. The projected (cinema) images are imposed by the “phallic power”. The women fight against the armies of the 20th century with cream cakes, their weapon from the kitchen. This is a mockery that is itself a weapon: mockery to get rid of images. But Liz doubts whether war and destruction can only be blamed on the men: "Maybe we can't do it better than you." Then Liz, Marianne and Gunilla take turns holding encouraging speeches from a balcony. Your listeners soon get into each other's hair and begin a tangible fight. Giraud interpreted this as behavior deviating from that of men: "Because women cannot be manipulated like men, that's how they don't work."

Liz makes a critical judgment of her sex mates: "We are ignorant, lazy, easily frightened and conservative." But Giraud stated that after the tour was over, the three women would have gained a new experience, an experienced elsewhere, namely the fight for their own values ​​and they would see their - unchanged - men in a different light. The tour itself could not be anything other than a dream, a “dream truth”, in which manifest and reveal what remains hidden in everyday life.

criticism

In 1970, Bernard Cohn said in Positif that the film was not entirely successful, but that it deserves some attention thanks to its inherent madness and derision. Zetterling first built a mechanism from different levels of action and then gave himself up with heart's content to "nail the stronger sex to the pillory". However, she sometimes becomes vulgar or heavy, but she has enough imagination not to sink into it too often and for too long. The British magazine Sight and Sound called the film a "high-pitched, annoying, single-track, teasing scream about suppressed femininity and women's affairs", with which the filmmaker harmed her cause with "shrill exaggeration". In 1990, Peter Cowie stated in his book on Scandinavian cinema that in Zetterling's films, women harbored a strong dislike for men. The tone of voice in The Girls was too screeching , and the emphasis on perversion too shoddy.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Bernard Cohn: Les journées de Poitiers . In: Positif , September 1970, p. 36
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Thérèse Giraud: Les filles de Mai Zetterling . In: Cahiers du cinéma , No. 262, January 1976, pp. 24-26
  3. ↑ a b Richard Henshaw: A festival of one's own: Review of women directors. In: Velvet Light Trap , No. 6/1972, p.39
  4. ↑ Michel Delahaye: Flickorna . In: Cahiers du cinéma , June 1969, p. 65
  5. ↑ Sight and Sound , Vol. 39, No. 2, Spring 1970, p. 112
  6. ^ Peter Cowie: Scandinavian cinema . The Tantivy Press, London 1990, ISBN 0-573-69911-9 , p. 151