Loving Couples

Actress Mai Zetterling's 1964 feature film directing debut was a provocative tour de force in its day and it still packs quite a punch today with its frank dissection of morality, motherhood, and female empowerment. Based on Agnes von Krusenstjerna's novel The Misses von Pahlen, the film is set in a Stockholm hospital circa 1915, where the stories of three women about to give birth are told in flashback. One is a middle-class woman in a cold, unhappy marriage to a servant who works for a wealthy family. Another is an emotionally fiery woman who divides her time between modeling and petty crime. The third is bisexual, carrying the child of an archeologist who will neither marry her nor acknowledge paternity. The range of emotions over their impending deliveries range from near indifference in the case of the first woman, to embracing progressive feminist politics and unapologetically bearing the child out of wedlock in the case of the last. While Zetterling collaborated with two Bergman regulars (actress Harriet Andersson and cinematographer Sven Nykvist), her artistic style is clearly her own: forceful, free-spirited, sensitive, and thoroughly challenging. A remarkable achievement, among Zetterling's finest work in her long-unheralded career behind the camera, Loving Couples is highly recommended. (P. Hall)