The Cinematheque

“Bold … An arresting, serious drama that proves [Zetterling] knows the directorial craft and is a welcome addition to it.”

A.H. Weiler, The New York Times

Mai Zetterling’s feature debut is so ambitiously crafted that it earned comparison to Citizen Kane upon its release. The film, with its use of actors from Ingmar Bergman’s circle of collaborators (as well as cinematographer Sven Nyqvist), is just as assured. But where Kane is motivated by an investigation’s calm rigour, Zetterling’s dazzling multi-protagonist journey into the past splinters then merges two ruling ideas: the certainty of patriarchal entrapment and the unresolvable mysteries of love. Three women are admitted into a maternity ward; each contemplates their pregnancy as an existential question. Their pasts resurface, none of which entirely conform to society’s expectations—to be straight, married, and contentedly resigned to the guidance of physicians and absent male partners. Based on writer Agnes von Krusenstjerna’s Fröknarna von Pahlen cycle, Loving Couples adventurously fragments its source’s novelistic detail into both reveries and nightmares.

In Swedish with English subtitles

The opening-night screening of Loving Couples will be introduced by novelist Anakana Schofield.

“Zetterling has eschewed the romanticizing or moralizing to which her male colleagues are prone … [She] deals bluntly with much that men tend at best to blush over or smirk at.”

Judith Crist, New York Herald Tribune

“As everyone knows, sex exists, inventively and multifariously; and when films ignore it, they lie … Loving Couples is full of corrective truth.”

Kenneth Tynan, The Observer