I Am Curious (Yellow)

I find 1967's Swedish film I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW) akin to an adolescent's peek over a father's shoulder as he rifles through issues of Playboy and maybe the New Republic.  So much mystery, so much unknowable. Strangely, director Vilgot Sjoman's film also reminded me of that 10cc song "Headroom", sung from the point of view of a kid curious about sexuality.  This film's title deals with the curiosity of a theater student named Lena Nyman, played by an actress of the same name.  She's in a movie directed by her boyfriend Vilgot (yes, Mr. Sjoman) which features a curious, socially conscious young woman who keeps files on her past lovers.

Lena and Vilgot have a troubled union, and he's jealous of the film's leading man Borje (Borje Ahlstedt).  In the film, Lena and Borje become fast bedmates, but his evasiveness is perhaps their undoing.  They also subscribe to very different political views - he's a Rightist Party Support, and she's militantly left wing.  She even keeps pictures of Francisco Franco and atrocities in Vietnam on her bedroom wall to fuel her venom.  In this movie within a movie, she confronts people on the streets of Stockholm with questions about their political affiliations, whether they feel there is a class system in Sweden.  Most are surprisingly friendly.  It made me think back to my Norwegian father, who like many of his countrymen had a disdain for their Scandinavian neighbors. Some much history there.

I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW) is mostly about Lena's (the film actor) attempted development.  Maybe she's only been defined by the men in her life.  She tries to get away, retreating to the country to practice yoga and meditation.  She also studies diagrams of advanced sexual positions.  (YELLOW) is infamous for its abundant nudity and sex scenes, one of which would easily still garner an NC-17 rating today.  They were enough to convince authorities in Massachusetts to seize the film and take it to the U.S. District court on obscenity charges. They were unsuccessful. 

To me, the natural but staged scenes of intercourse were awesomely unsexy and joyless.  But surely that's what Sjoman (er, both of them) was going for.

Is that why folks lined up for this film? They were curious.  Elsewhere, the film plays like an early meta exercise.  If there was an attempt to do a parallel analysis of politics and sex, I don't think it quite came across.  Sjoman commits many arthouse crimes in his movie(s), some of which are clever and others tired.  The use of onscreen titles is mostly for humorous effect, as are the periodic interruptions by a television news program.  Then we're back to long winded (mostly interesting) political discourse, or sex in a tree.  Ouch.

The merging of fiction and non-fiction wasn't as effective as hoped, and by the time we see the film crew again that thread had more or less had lost its interest.  

I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW) is a real mixed bag: boring, fascinating, cheeky, and frequently absurd.  A low point was Lena's apology to (clips of) Martin Luther King, Jr.  But at all times, Vilgot Sjoman makes this project cinematic.  Very textured and artful.  This is must viewing for cinephiles, despite their ultimate verdict.

P.S. - A companion film called I AM CURIOUS (BLUE), which details the same events but with a different tone and some different scenes, also exists.  Review to come.