AM CURIOUS (YELLOW) I Movie Review

Jag Ar Nyfiken—Gul
Jag Ar Nyfiken—En Film i Gult

There is a plot; Swedish filmmaker Vilgot Sjöman, playing Swedish filmmaker Vilgot Sjöman, decides to make a film starring actress Lena Nyman. Her character, Lena, is curious about Vietnam, the Swedish class system, and civil rights. She is also curious about sex, and has it many times during the film, usually with her boyfriend Börje (played by her boyfriend Börje), but also with Swedish filmmaker Vilgot Sjöman. Swedish and Danish “art” movies about sex were legion in the 1960s, and I Am Curious (Yellow) is the most pretentiously highfalutin' of the bunch. It was distributed by Grove Press Films, a division of the pioneering publishing house that printed Naked Lunch and Tropic of Cancer when others would not. Grove Press agreed to send I Am Curious out with an “X” rating, despite the fact that many theatres wouldn't touch an “X” rated movie lest the theatre be labeled a porno house. (It shouldn't go unmentioned that the sex scenes were simulated.) One of those in attendance at the packed, opening-day matinee at the art house that ran it in suburban Detroit was that suburb's mayor; when local news stations stuck cameras in his face after the premiere, he flatly and authoritatively pronounced that “the film is definitely obscene in three places.” I would have said four, myself, but that's neither here nor there. It ran unfettered for months to a audience of half suits and half raincoats. Within two years, the theatre—which had premiered Blow-Up the year prior to I Am Curious—was running hard-core sex films. It's now a church. If there's a moral here, I do not know what it is. Nor, for that matter, do I know the whereabouts of Swedish filmmaker Vilgot Sjöman.

NEXT STOP… I Am Curious (Blue), I, a Woman, I, a Woman Part II

1967 95m/B SW Lena Nyman, Peter Lindgren; D: Vilgot Sjoman. VHS HTV