Dubious Yellow

Impounded last year by the U.S. Customs Service, I Am Curious (Yellow) has since been the subject both of bitter legal wrangles and a lot of gossip. Reports circulated that Yellow* contained some of the most detailed sex scenes ever spliced into an overground film. Grove Press, which imported Yellow from Sweden, issued a paperback copy of the script "with over 250 illustrations," many of the sort that usually come in plain brown wrappers. Now, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that Yellow may be shown uncut, and moviegoers can confirm all the rumors for themselves. They are true. The chances are, however, that viewers who expect a titillating kind of 1,001 Scandinavian Nights will be disappointed. For all its well-publicized explicitness, Yellow is not much more erotic than the Fannie Farmer cookbook.

In All Directions. Director Vilgot Sjoeman told his leading lady even before filming began that "it will all be very improvised and we'll use all the film we need. The whole thing will be rather crazy and we'll get all of Sweden into the film." That's precisely the trouble. Sjoeman is like Stephen Leacock's young nobleman, riding madly off in all directions. He tries to reproduce the substance of Swedish politics, render a portrait of contemporary youth, satyrize the mechanics of film making, and dramatize his own hang-ups, all the while telling a rather conventional and sometimes funny story about a confused adolescent girl. These separate parts may occasionally work on their own, but they never form a cohesive or compelling whole.

Lena (Lena Nyman) is at once Yellow's nominal subject and central symbol. An ardent political activist, she carries radical, rabble-rousing signs and participates in all sorts of public demonstrations, including coupling with her boy friend Boerje (Boerje Ahlstedt) on a balustrade in front of Stockholm's Royal Palace. When Lena runs off to the countryside, Boerje follows and turns her meditation into a Portnoyesque scene that is certain to get the film banned west of the Hudson and north of The Bronx.

Furious, Lena picks a fight with Boerje, who takes off back to the city in his MG. At film's end, the two have paid a joint visit to a delousing clinic and have effected a kind of Pirandellian reconciliation, applying less to their roles in the movie than to their extracurricular relationship. Intercut with this dreary dramaturgy are endless man-on-the-street interviews conducted by Lena ("Do you think that Swedish society has a class system?" "Do you belong to the labor movement?") and lots of shots of Sjoeman making the film. But the political issues have little meaning or relevance for American audiences, and the efforts to correlate the craft of film making with the plot seem a haphazard and confused exercise.

New Standard. Although Yellow /s an artistic failure, it will certainly stand as a cultural curiosity. Its sex scenes may be more raucous than revolutionary, but they do establish a new standard of specifics by which subsequent films will be judged. Consenting adults will hardly be surprised by anything the movie has to show, although they may be amused to note that Lena and Boerje are quite obviously charading when they are supposed to be copulating. In fact, if it were not for the sex scenes. Yellow would probably never have been imported. It is simply too interminably boring, too determinedly insular and, like the sex scenes themselves, finally and fatally passionless.

* There is also a sequel, / Am Curious (Blue), as yet unreleased in the U.S. Both films deal with roughly the same characters and situations, but from different perspectives. The parenthetical titles refer to the colors of the Swedish flag, hinting of the ponderous political preoccupation the films share.

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