Dirty pretty thing
DVD review: Exposed
The 1970s Swedish sex movie 'Exposed' is, says Tim Lucas, unexpectedly subversive and full of almost Buñuelian ruses
Exposed
Gustav Wiklund; Sweden 1971; Synapse Films; Aspect Ratio 1.66:1; Features: featurette with Wiklund and Christina Lindberg, two music tracks by Lindberg, stills gallery, original and US trailers
Being a Christina Lindberg fan can be a difficult thing to rationalise. A remarkably nubile specimen with long lashes and porcelain-doll features, she started nude modelling while still in high school and spent the 1970s ascending to cult stardom in a series of Swedish erotic films - often well made but, more often than not, falling on the wrong side of today's political correctness. In Schoolgirl Report 4: What Drives Parents to Despair, she plays a teenage girl who decides to seduce the handsome older brother with whom she has shared her bedroom since childhood. Her most recurring formula casts her, as in Maid in Sweden, as a naive provincial virgin who comes to the big city (Stockholm), where she is raped or recruited into dangerous relationships with abusive older men. There are exceptions, such as Joe Sarno's arty and psychologically teasing Young Playthings, and what has become Lindberg's signature performance as the eyepatched hammer of vengeance in Thriller: A Cruel Picture, released to theatres as They Call Her One Eye, but there is a lot that is, in all ways save libidinously and perhaps aesthetically, indefensible.
One previously difficult-to-see picture that looms large in the Lindberg canon is Exposed, which was released to US drive-ins under the more judgemental title The Depraved, following in the advance footsteps of a masterfully exploitative trailer (included here) that runs for nearly four minutes and spoils all the juiciest bits while conning ticket-buyers into imagining there is still more to be seen. ("The Depraved," says a cordial but unreliable narrator, "has been banned in 23 countries." Print advertising upped that number to 36.)
The first of two features directed by actor Gustav Wiklund, both of which would star Lindberg, Exposed opens with 17-year-old Lena Svensson (Lindberg) thumbing a ride, as 1970s girls were wont to do, after an argument with her oedipally challenged boyfriend Jan (Björn Adelly). Narration informs us that, on a specific day in August, Lena was last seen accepting a ride from a red Opal stationwagon - but doesn't say by whom; it's the first in a series of almost Buñuelian ruses that lure us on to rugs about to be pulled from under us. Lena is a spiritual sister to Catherine Deneuve's Séverine in Belle de jour, and the sexual assault that befalls her inside the red stationwagon turns out to be only the first in a series of fantasies besieging the fertile imagination of a young girl who doubts her boyfriend's ability to satisfy her over the course of a lifetime. There is also an older man in her life, Helge (Heinz Hopf), obviously patterned on Roy Scheider in Klute, who presides over sex and drug parties and blackmails Lena into doing with his male guests whatever they demand. Or is this yet another of Lena's elaborate inventions?
Writer-director Wiklund, who, interviewed in a supplementary featurette, admits his inability to argue with one critic's verdict of "Garbage!", actually used this opportunity to create a better-than-average, playfully subversive little movie, not least of all when Lena and Jan go to the cinema and the screen fills with nearly four uninterrupted minutes of RKO's Tarzan Triumphs (Synapse Films gamely assigns the clip its own chapter break, 'In the Jungle'). His direction also closely adheres to the fact that nothing salacious actually happens outside the heroine's imagination. For example, when Lena discovers the predatory Helge standing in the dark of her apartment, we aren't as startled as she is when the lights come on; we are made to view the surprise from Helge's perspective, as he waits in the dark, which robs us of the surprise but is a more truthful showing of Lena's conscious construction of the moment.
Exposed is available in the UK as part of Swedish Erotica Volume 1, a box-set from Revelation Films also including The Language of Love (the movie selection that ruins Robert De Niro's date with Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver) and Anita, Swedish Nymphet (also with Lindberg). Synapse Films, spearheading the Lindberg revival in America with three other releases, has brought Exposed to DVD with a greater sense of occasion and a still greater sense of fun. The English-dubbed version appears to be sadly lost, but the Swedish-language, English-subtitled version presented here safeguards one of Lindberg's more relaxed and feeling performances. The bonuses include the aforementioned featurette, in which Wiklund recounts "the worst mistake of my life" (turning down an offer from Roger Corman to buy the film and make two additional features for his then fledgling New World Pictures). Lindberg herself is also on hand but, like the Swedish sphinx she always was, she has relatively little to say.