A Swedish Love Story

Twenty-four minutes into A Swedish Love Story, something potentially disturbing for the average Portuguese viewer occurs: the co-protagonist puts a Maria biscuit in her mouth. Let's get this straight, so that no one claims it out of patriotism: this flour-based snack does not come from Portugal, having been invented in London for a royal wedding; its popularity in Iberia is due to a surplus of flour following the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Let's continue... or not.

The uncharacteristic snacks, thoughtlessly grabbed from the pantry, are as diegetic as any other element in Roy Andersson's feature film debut. Taken out of its plastic wrapper, a chocolate bar triggers one of the few moments of comedy: it is held in the left hand of a very calm cyclist in a tracksuit; his other hand is on the handlebars, in motion, showing Pär — our co-protagonist, just a boy on a moped — the true image of cool. Later, slices of chorizo between buttered slices of white bread: a possible snack, prepared by the also pre-teen Annika (the other hemisphere of the film) for Pär. Bland or not, food shows tenderness at this pivotal moment in our lives: welcoming someone we hope to be intimate with into our home.

But what do two brats know about love? That is the central question of a work that does not dare to ask it; to do so would be to diminish passion. It is not just a question of seeing them simulate adulthood, of which they only know leather jackets and lit cigarettes (perhaps they suspect what is to come and only want to know the props; call them dumb). It's that Andersson makes good use of his characters, and this allows him to economize on words: this is the first of several mood pieces in his filmography, relying mainly on the visceral presence of the grown-ups.

Therein lies a clue to the director we came to know in Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014): the urban aesthete, the surrealist-via-Tati still absent in 1970. But, as he would do in his 21st-century films, in A Swedish Love Story, Andersson choreographs the adults in a seemingly illogical ballet. Without coveting any drama of Bergmanian proportions, impenetrable faces and motivations predominate, as do even more unpredictable screams and aggressions. At the crayfish banquet, sponsored by Pär's parents, a small psychological horror is staged with Annika's father. Destabilized by happiness (not very effusive) and nicknamed “refrigerator charlatan,” the man shatters two bottles of sparkling wine and laughs violently. (And the inexplicable slap to Eva sadly echoes the final scene of Lars von Trier's The Idiots.)

The relationship between Annika and Pär works in the simplest and most expressive contrast to this backdrop: hope upstream, disenchantment downstream. The loss of innocence is not felt à la Vittorio De Sica: who will think of the poor little children, plasticine brains, corrupted by a debauched society? For that, there would have to be an infinitesimal desire left in these adults: beige like their homes, they squander their money on new blinds and reserve their happiness for an unlikely new apartment (it must be acknowledged: Pär's parents, apparently satisfied with their country life, in their pajamas and aprons, are excluded from this narrative). There is only one midpoint in the gradient between greens and grays: Eva's empty gaze, on the cusp of her thirties. “How old are you, really?” she asks the 14-year-old girl, seeing in her the familiar, futile rush to grow up.

We find the same rebelliousness of lighters and guitars in Tarde para morir joven, by Dominga Sotomayor, set in an ecological community in the 1990s. It makes sense for the Chilean to recognize A Swedish Love Story as a formative film for her practice. In the style of Andersson in 1970, Sotomayor makes a naturalistic coming-of-age film: neither of them concerned with impressing the viewer; neither with the patience to collide (for now) with the expected marks of the author. Evanescent and organic, but also unexpected and brutal, in tune with all the emotions that surface.

Eight years after “Tous les garçons et les filles” (1962), the founding song of youthful heartbreak, Annika and Pär experience a love that is clearly post-Françoise Hardy: more than walks and platonic promises, there is touch and warmth, meaningless groping. And it is hormonal in every sense: libido is joined by primal feelings, short-lived, materialized in playground crying and, immediately afterwards, in the reunion of repentant madeleines. After all, what do adults know about love?