Scandinavian Sindrome

Weekend, honored as the best Danish film of 1963, suggests that life in that tidy, prosperous welfare state is a smorgasbord of boredom and discontent. As interpreted by Director Palle Kjaerulff-Schmidt, its benefits whet the appetite but dull the taste. "What we need is an air raid," says one world-weary citizen. "Masses of planes, guns firing, everybody seeking cover or protecting the kids." Lacking such clear-cut goals, he and his friends make Scandinavia sizzle.

The movie tells of three married couples and one bushy-tailed bachelor, all in their 30s, weekending at a seaside resort where they drink, quarrel, and trade mates--often so explicitly that the film was banned in Paris, of all places. What seemed objectionable to the family-minded French was dragging the children along as witnesses. Little eyes pop, come Sunday morning, when an unhappy husband steals down to the beach to attack a blonde, buxom nursemaid while she tends her flock. Inexplicably, this departure from form jolts the wife swappers into a moment of sober self-appraisal.

Weekend's underlying seriousness emerges in one crisp scene, in which an elderly couple stop in to say hello, and stay for lunch. As the aged innocents chatter amiably about the idyllic days of their own youth, the chasm between generations sets the young hosts fidgeting. One by one, guiltily, they drift away. The point is neatly stated. Too often, though, the film exploits the malaise it pretends to examine, and the drama becomes sociosexual cheesecake, an oversized slice of Danish blue. The camera records what the characters do, but offers few insights into the individuals or the society that produced them. Cruelly stomping down a child's sand castle, raising hob in a roadhouse, or pairing off at random, they seem little more than anonymous delinquents--the kind of blank, boisterous folk that cause the family trade to gather up their towels and baskets and move to a nice quiet spot at the far end of the beach.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.