Lend Me Your Wife

What cannot be lent: Edith Calmar’s unapologetic cinema

In the opening credits of Lend Me Your Wife, we see a storyboard of caricatures of the main characters and members of the film crew. Otto Carlmar, the producer, is shown holding a sack of banknotes and a whip — an archetypal image of the person wielding financial and disciplinary control over the making of a film. However, what grabs our attention is the representation of Edith Carlmar: slender, with sharp facial features, short hair, wearing black trousers, manly shoes, gloves and a straight-cut polo shirt. Arms crossed and holding a clapperboard, her eyes are fixed on the film set in the background, her chin slightly raised. Her body language transmits conviction and authority.

This was the last but one of ten features directed by Edith Carlmar. [1] A pioneer of Norwegian cinema, Carlmar, along with her husband Otto (who was responsible for the screenplay), produced this film about the story of Bjørn Lund, a statistics specialist pursuing a promotion at his office. However, the company he works for — an old-fashioned factory making baby products and toys — favours married workers for its leadership positions. Matrimony, then, is a kind of prerequisite, obliging the bachelor Lund to invent an imaginary wedding. This premise allows the director to explore what the critic Kathryn Hanson (1998) identified as the subversion of the “woman-object”. Instead of using the camera to merely decorate the shot with feminine figures, Carlmar establishes them as bearers of the female gaze, focusing on the depth of these characters as they navigate through the demands of the patriarchal system. It is the women, supposedly in the background, who dictate the rhythm and questions of the film.

The film features several tropes of screwball comedies, with unlikely scenarios and a farce at its centre. Nevertheless, Carlmar’s singular humour, characteristic for its irony and eroticism, affords us a critical analysis of Norwegian culture at the time. The filmmaker used a range of commercial genres as “cover” for subversive commentary on autonomy and class. To some extent anticipating the debate proposed by Laura Mulvey in “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema” (1975), which denounced the way that classical cinema frequently reduced female figures to passivity and visual spectacle, Carlmar develops characters who subvert that logic by affecting the plot through strategic decisions. In these films, women are more than mere objects of contemplation, instead playing with the fakeness of domesticity itself, thus guaranteeing their own agency and claiming space.

“Lend Me Your Wife” is also the refrain of a song performed during a party put on by Mr. Rund, the director of the company and a pseudo-moralist who, despite always expounding conservative values, flirts with Lund’s “wife”. It is at this peak moment in the plot that Carlmar deconstructs the myth of feminine passivity. For example, by using a range of close-ups on Anita (the fake wife), the director reveals that the “ideal wife” is, in fact, a performance carefully mastered by the character. These frames are absent of glamourous lighting, to avoid turning the actress into a doll-like diva. The close-up, rather than fetishise, exposes male objectification and women’s strategies for subverting power relationships through a certain level of seduction. Long before the theoretical formalisation of feminist debates in the 1970s, Carlmar was already building a brave resistance, shifting the centre of gravity in Norwegian cinema away from men and towards women.

Edith Carlmar was an unapologetic director, who took charge of the film set and drew on genres considered masculine without asking for permission. Her daring was already apparent in her first feature, the film noir classic Death is a Caress (1949), in which she upended conventions by filming masculine weakness. After a decade of incessant production at the head of Carlmar Film S.A., putting out one film per year, she ended her directing career in 1959. The thundering success of Lend Me Your Wife, one of the most watched films in the history of Norwegian cinema, served as her commercial highpoint before her departure.

Her decision to retire at the age of 48 was driven by physical and mental exhaustion, added to her constant clashes with the puritanism of the times. The Statens Filmkontroll (censorship committee) kept Carlmar under strict surveillance thanks to her use of socially critical, taboo themes. Tired out by political strain, she declared that her contribution was complete. As a final parting gesture and demonstration of class consciousness, she gave away the distribution rights to her catalogue to a syndicate of industry veterans. Carlmar returned to her roots in acting, which is how she had started her career, and began to take on minor roles, far from the pressures of leading a shoot. For her, cinema was a mission accomplished with integrity, and this was a conscious act of personal preservation versus an industry that she herself had helped to modernise.

[1] After this film, Carlmar directed the provocative The Wayward Girl (1959), which featured the cinema debut of Liv Ullmann. The film addresses sexual awakening and youthful rebellion, consolidating Carlmar’s style in treating female subjectivity with a realism that challenged contemporary morals.

References

Hanson, K. (1998). The first lady of Norwegian cinema: Edith Carlmar and the female gaze. Scandinavian Studies, 70(4), 481–498.

Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18.