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The Moon Is Made Of Green Cheese



Månen är en grön ost. Mai Zetterling. 1977.

I was going to make an effort to blow through the Elia Kazan box set, but I just couldn’t face another worthy middlebrow movie tonight.

So I’m back to the Zetterling box set instead. It’s a nice box set.

Even got a poster:

[twenty minutes pass]

This is a very odd movie. I mean, most of Zetterling’s movies are… er… out of the mainstream? But this is very odd indeed; I don’t quite know what to make of it. It’s also too short to be a feature movie — was this made for some experimental TV thing at SVT?

[ten minutes pass]

Well, OK, this is a movie for very young children, I guess? Think Teletubbies, but slower? And even more psychedelic?

And the overcooked spaghetti… *shiver*

[ten minutes pass]

This movie is intermittently gorgeous. It’s so inventive and odd. But… I think you’d have to be a lot drunker than I am to make these scenes connect in any way. It’s one “wha” after another, which is perhaps the right thing for an audience of four-year-olds, but…

[the end]

Twenty minutes was cut out of this, and then it was shown on TV at the time. And… I do understand why. Because this doesn’t quite work. And I’ve seen Noli me tangere (and liked it): I’m totally qualified to watch movies where nothing much happens for a very long stretches of time, but this just doesn’t work.

I do love the non sequiturs the parents are spouting: It’s so aggressively from the point of view of the children: Parents are always talking about things that’s can’t be understood, and Zetterling makes that happen in a very tangible way.

But, like… no. I want to love it, because it’s totally gorgeous, but it just doesn’t work.

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