Where to begin with Mai Zetterling

Undervalued and underseen, Mai Zetterling’s directorial work explodes like a firecracker. Even today, more than 50 years since her most fertile period, the films remain fresh in tone, content and form. Filled with transgressive eroticism, they arouse controversy and transcend conventional narrative structures. More often than not, they centre on characters trying to find their place in life – just as Zetterling was when she made them. 

While still in her teens, she rose to prominence as an actor in her native Sweden, breaking through in Alf Sjöberg’s startling Torment (1944), written by a young Ingmar Bergman. The film’s success led her to the UK, where she played the eponymous immigrant in Basil Dearden’s excellent wartime drama Frieda (1947). A contract with the Rank Organisation followed, but sadly good roles didn’t: she was typecast as a refugee, and then as a sex symbol. A trip to Hollywood for the amusing Danny Kaye vehicle Knock on Wood (1954) paved the way for stardom, but Zetterling walked away, uncomfortable in the spotlight and unsatisfied with the quality of the female parts on offer. 

Given such a predicament, it’s unsurprising that Zetterling’s own films show a concern for the role of women in contemporary society – something which didn’t always sit well with male critics. Time and again, reviewers refer to her films as ‘cold’ – perhaps because they engage the mind more than the heart, or perhaps because their explicit sexuality and pessimistic attitude towards marriage simply don’t fit with conventional notions of femininity. But even without her former image as Britain’s homely ‘Swede-heart’, Zetterling’s directorial work would feel brazen, bold and anarchic.  

After directing 4 short documentaries for the BBC, Zetterling made a BAFTA-nominated, Golden Lion-winning short – The War Game (1963) – before returning to Sweden to make her debut feature: Loving Couples (1964). The film was adapted from a suite of novels by Agnes von Krusenstjerna, whose writing was known for its frank, scandalous sexuality and its detailed portrayal of women’s lives. 

In condensing the 7-volume series, Zetterling utilised an elaborate flashback structure and personalised the material by adding scenes from her own life (recognisable from their description in All Those Tomorrows, her essential autobiography). 

Set during the early days of the First World War, the story concerns 3 pregnant women (Gio Petré, Harriet Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom) who recall their lives and their lovers as they wait to give birth on a maternity ward. Flashbacks reveal their experiences and, as Zetterling put it, their “attitudes to the fundamentals of life: birth and marriage, sexual relations, human feelings, freedom”. In telling these women’s stories, Zetterling highlights the misogyny of the men that surround them. 

Nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the film was condemned for its sexual (and homosexual) content – even its poster was banned. Part of the scandal was down to the director’s gender and misguided perceptions about what women should – and shouldn’t – talk about. Indeed, it was often said that Zetterling directed like a man (whatever that means). 

If there was a particular man in mind, it was probably Bergman. On the surface, the story of Loving Couples bears a strong resemblance to So Close to Life (1958), and Zetterling frequently used actors, crew and even props that were familiar from Bergman’s work. They shared a love of serious theatre – particularly Strindberg – and he directed her in Music in Darkness (1948). While an insignificant early work, it was perhaps enough (especially when combined with Torment) to place Zetterling unfairly in Bergman’s shadow – another reason, maybe, why her work has been so overlooked. 

For her next film, Night Games (1966), Zetterling adapted her own novel of the same name, which explored the decadence and perversity of the upper classes (serving as a wider metaphor for European society as a whole). Perfecting the flashback structure of Loving Couples, Zetterling fluidly interweaves the childhood and adulthood of Jan (Keve Hjelm and Jörgen Lindström) as he returns to his family home in an attempt to overcome the trauma of his incestuous upbringing. Filled with a baroque grotesqueness and an ending that foreshadows Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), it proved so provocative that, once again, even its poster was banned. 

In 1968 came Zetterling’s 2 best films, made back-to-back – Doctor Glas and The Girls – both of which flopped massively upon release. In the former, adapted from a novel by Hjalmar Söderberg, the eponymous doctor helps a reverend’s estranged wife escape her husband’s lecherous, non-consensual clutches. In The Girls, 3 actresses (played by Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom) go on a theatrical tour with Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and, inspired by their characters, find themselves battling for female liberation in a society dominated by men. Audaciously experimental, the film may be drenched in feminist theory, but it plays like an absurdist comedy. 

For these early features, Zetterling collaborated with her then-husband, the writer David Hughes. When they divorced, she ploughed the painful experience into an astonishing TV film of raw, unfettered emotion: We Have Many Names (1976). 

Later, back in England, she was hired to direct the borstal drama Scrubbers (1982), which was originally intended as a quasi-sequel to Alan Clarke’s Scum (1979). Zetterling conducted extensive research, resulting in a compassionate portrayal of the young offenders, and a critical view of the prison system. 

For her final feature, Amorosa (1986), Zetterling returned to Agnes von Krusenstjerna – this time telling the novelist’s life story rather than adapting her work. The film begins as a fever dream, with von Krusenstjerna being committed to an asylum during the Carnival of Venice. An extended flashback follows, beginning on a joyful note with the Swedish summer and her youthful (same-sex) dalliances, before becoming increasingly unhinged as illness, madness and an abusive husband take hold. 

Throughout it all, von Krusenstjerna insists that she wants to write, searching for the truth – about herself, women, love and eroticism. Given such thematic similarities, it’s no wonder that Zetterling returned to von Krusenstjerna, and it seems fitting that her 2 von Krusenstjerna projects bookend her directorial feature film career (though subsequent work for television followed). 

In 1977, Zetterling made The Moon Is a Blue Cheese, an unsuccessful foray into the world of children’s entertainment: in a series of vignettes conjured by a young girl’s imagination, colours are personified by adults. It’s like a cross between a psychedelic trip and a bizarre pantomime, at once typical of Zetterling’s formal and narrative inventiveness, and atypical in its total lack of bite and depth. It reaches its nadir when Ingvar Boman, as Red, appears on screen dressed as a Native American (and, unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated incident in Zetterling’s work: her short film The Black Cat in the Black Mouse Socks, from the portmanteau film Love (1982), stars Joni Mitchell in blackface, dressed as a pimp, trying to gatecrash a Halloween party – another bad place to start).  

Towards the end of her life, Zetterling returned to acting, and there she found more luck with child-friendly material. One of her final roles was as the grandmother in Nicolas Roeg’s terrifyingly good Roald Dahl adaption, The Witches (1990). 

• Loving Couples screens as part of the Women Make Film season at BFI Southbank, October to November 2020