Amorosa. Mai Zetterling. 1986. ⚂

[twenty minutes pass]

Stina Ekblad could read the phone book and it’d sound profound.

[fifty minutes pass]

But this movie doesn’t quite work? Every scene is like… almost fabulous, but then there’s something that’s… off. I mean, the actors are great. The set design is absolutely amazing; every single room is like “whoa”. But it’s like… the rhythm is off? Sometimes the editing just seems downright amateurish. But perhaps the problem is the cinematography? Hm… There’s two people credited with the cinematography, and one seems to have done mostly TV, and the other had only done a single movie before this.

[the end]

I really wanted to like this movie, but…

Anyway, this concludes my Mai Zetterling festival. She’s definitely a distinctive director, but wildly uneven. That is, some of the movies are totally amazing, and the rest … aren’t? But there’s a sensibility behind these movies that makes watching even the … bad ones? pretty interestng.

Love. Mai Zetterling. 1982. ⚄

This is the third Zetterling-directed short from the Love anthology movie. This one is written by her, too.

[the end]

So this is from an anthology film about love, and Zetterling is contrary as usual: Most of this short is a sumptuous dinner prepared by a mother for her son.

The subtext here is all kinds of “eh?” and “urr”, but it’s a really enjoyable little movie to watch. Those dishes look delish!

Perhaps the most odd thing about this is that the mother and the son look pretty much… in the same age group? I tried googling what age they were, really, but the woman, Maureen Fitzgerald, has the most common name in Irish history? And the son was born in 1945? So he was late 30s? Which is what the mother looks like, too?

So… casting problems again.

But it’s a lovely ambiguous little movie.

Love. Mai Zetterling. 1982. ⚁

Oh, Zetterling directed three of the shorts in the Love anthology movie, so this is the second one. This one is written by Edna O’Brien.

[the end]

This is very odd. Like the scene where they’re eating oysters (on the shell) off of that woman’s body. Like… how did that happen? Did the guy sit there shucking oysters for ten minutes first before they got it on? Did he call room service (at his private apt), and then they got oysters on the shell delivered, and then they arranged them all over her boobs? They’re usually chilled? But if they weren’t, they’re now eating lukewarm oysters? That’s kinda disgusting?

THIS SEX SCENE MAKES NO SENSE.