Just Trying to Help, with Sex

I think the makers of 1973's Anita: Swedish Nymphet at least glanced at a real book about nymphomania. At least, Stellan Skarsgard makes the talk about many nymphomaniacs not being able to have orgasms and pursuing constant sex out of a sense of worthlessness sound legitimate. It's still all kind of a charming pretext for softcore pornography. I mean, it's sort of charming that the makers of this film seemed to think it was necessary.



Christina Lindberg is in every way great as Anita. Despite the thinly veiled true nature of this film, she and Skarsgard both give very sincere performances and they actually make sort of an adorable couple if you can look past the business about him being her sexual saviour. I'd say what the film needed was some rounding out of the characters, but then I think I'd be forgetting the actual point of the movie.



Skarsgard plays Erik, who seems to be in charge of a small troupe of classical musicians who all live together in a two story house. It's here that Erik brings Anita after he comes across her fucking a random old man at a construction site. Anita tells him her life story, particularly concerning her parents who have consistently treated her as worthless throughout her life.



Maybe that's why they don't stop her doing an impromptu strip tease for her father's friends after she and her sister have given a little recital while their mother accompanies them on piano. Why do I keep trying to rationalise? I'm never going to make fit the curiously tender lesbian sex scene with a social worker that abruptly leads to Anita taking a career performing in cabaret.



A nice bit of somewhat eccentric fun, this movie, though I wouldn't recommend watching it without alcohol. It turns out no amount of softcore porn with oddly good performances can make heavy handed psychoanalytic dialogue less boring.

One thing's for sure, I'm never getting that damned theme song out of my head; "A girl like me, a girl like me . . . I show me now for you, I show me now for you . . ." The song has English lyrics but the reason it's stuck in my head is that I had to manually fix the out of sync subtitles for the otherwise Swedish language film and there were a few test runs before I got it right. I spent two hours doing it while eating breakfast and listening to The Howard Stern Show yesterday. I suppose it was worth it.