Of Love and Lust

The Swedish film Of Love and Lust takes its title from a book by Theodore Roik and comprises adaptations of two short stories by August Strindberg. This juxtaposition is appropriate, because the stories are valuable both as entertainment and as psychological studies. One, the story of dust, is a bitter, sardonic chronicle of a marriage without love, and the other, that of love, is a delightfully pointed satire, of Ibsen's A Doll House.

The first story, ironically titled On Payment, chronicles the life of one of the most unpleasant females to cross the screen in a long time. She is determined ever to remain single, but nevertheless, marries a mild-mannered professor who believes that marriage should involve a "union of souls," and not sexual companionship. Unfortunately the professor soon realizes that such a platonic arrangement is unsatisfactory. Eventually his wife, who has secured him a promotion and a seat in Parliament, yields to him--but only as a bribe for introducing her feminist bills into Parliament.

A Doll's House provides a welcome relief to the grimness of On Payment. A pretty young woman, happily married to a naval officer, meets a militant suffragette during one of his long trips. Her husband comes home to find his wife cold and unresponsive, married to him without being his wife. He's soon back in the saddle, though, for she is enough of a wife to be jealous when he seduces the suffragette right before her eyes.

The acting in both films is excellent, and makes up somewhat for the otherwise insufficient subtitles. Anita Bjork and Anders Hendrikson, the couple in On Payment, underplay their roles, but make effective use of subtle facial expressions. In A Doll's House Mai Zetterling is appropriately scatter-brained as the wife.

The two stories are quite different in their moods, characters, and settings, but their theme is the same: "It's a hell to be married and have no wife." Although choppy editing mars the first story somewhat, skillful photography, sensitive acting, and realistic settings make the most out of two astute and absorbing tales.