I'm not sure I'm qualified to review this movie because I walked out after an hour, something I rarely do. (Usually if I'm not enjoying a film, I fall asleep.)
The current IMDb rating is too high.
Something went wrong with the exposition in this movie. After a while I was able to discern that the story involves a troubled and promiscuous teenager abandoned by her mother at a relaxed juvenile residence. For reasons that were unexplained in the movie, the young residents were allowed to do what they wanted, and come and go as they pleased. Of course, they all went to Stockholm, and got into trouble. (Is this realistic? What kind of state-run facility was this exactly?)
At some point she blithely and stupidly got caught up in a sex network of some kind involving an older guy and then a group of older people. (Who were the men with Glans?) They got these girls drunk and had sex with them. This is pedophile rape, and a rather powerful scene, but the movie doesn't really dwell on it. The event doesn't seem to bother the girl at all.
You have to give the moviegoer some reason to care about what happens. A movie should have a hero, or antihero, of some kind. I thought she was it, but I developed little sympathy for her, even though we were shown some of her back story. I understand that girls just want to have fun, and need some cash now and again, but what is in it for the moviegoer? There seemed to be no insights, no entertainment value.
The rest of the plot was difficult to follow (at least for the first hour). For the life of me, I couldn't quite put the pieces together. It didn't help that the filmmaker lingered a little too long on details and activities that seemed corollary and unnecessary.
From what I could gather, there was a woman (lesbian?) running an unsophisticated prostitution ring involving several different people, a few Swedish politicians (who?), including some enacting a bill to decriminalize incest (?), Polish diplomats who have sex in their offices (?), security officials, an investigator and so on. The investigator is tasked with investigating the prostitution ring; he does it by creeping up the stairs and listening through the door.
The seduction and sex scenes were squalid.
Almost everyone seemed to be constantly smoking. Endless shots of people sitting around, languidly smoking. For me, smoking is usually somewhat disgusting to watch; here we see gratuitous tobacco abuse in every scene. Were the Swedes such heavy smokers back then?
Much of the action takes place at night, or in the rain, or indoors in rather decrepit, cheap-looking buildings. There was nothing here for the eye.
I suppose this might be a movie about the horrors of ultra-liberalism in Sweden in the 1970s and moral corruption in Swedish politics at the time. If so, it wasn't (for at least the first hour of this movie) really entertaining or easy to follow.
The question that arose for me was this: why should I care what happens to these people?? After two people walked out, I realised I didn't care, so I walked out as well.
The current IMDb rating is too high.
Something went wrong with the exposition in this movie. After a while I was able to discern that the story involves a troubled and promiscuous teenager abandoned by her mother at a relaxed juvenile residence. For reasons that were unexplained in the movie, the young residents were allowed to do what they wanted, and come and go as they pleased. Of course, they all went to Stockholm, and got into trouble. (Is this realistic? What kind of state-run facility was this exactly?)
At some point she blithely and stupidly got caught up in a sex network of some kind involving an older guy and then a group of older people. (Who were the men with Glans?) They got these girls drunk and had sex with them. This is pedophile rape, and a rather powerful scene, but the movie doesn't really dwell on it. The event doesn't seem to bother the girl at all.
You have to give the moviegoer some reason to care about what happens. A movie should have a hero, or antihero, of some kind. I thought she was it, but I developed little sympathy for her, even though we were shown some of her back story. I understand that girls just want to have fun, and need some cash now and again, but what is in it for the moviegoer? There seemed to be no insights, no entertainment value.
The rest of the plot was difficult to follow (at least for the first hour). For the life of me, I couldn't quite put the pieces together. It didn't help that the filmmaker lingered a little too long on details and activities that seemed corollary and unnecessary.
From what I could gather, there was a woman (lesbian?) running an unsophisticated prostitution ring involving several different people, a few Swedish politicians (who?), including some enacting a bill to decriminalize incest (?), Polish diplomats who have sex in their offices (?), security officials, an investigator and so on. The investigator is tasked with investigating the prostitution ring; he does it by creeping up the stairs and listening through the door.
The seduction and sex scenes were squalid.
Almost everyone seemed to be constantly smoking. Endless shots of people sitting around, languidly smoking. For me, smoking is usually somewhat disgusting to watch; here we see gratuitous tobacco abuse in every scene. Were the Swedes such heavy smokers back then?
Much of the action takes place at night, or in the rain, or indoors in rather decrepit, cheap-looking buildings. There was nothing here for the eye.
I suppose this might be a movie about the horrors of ultra-liberalism in Sweden in the 1970s and moral corruption in Swedish politics at the time. If so, it wasn't (for at least the first hour of this movie) really entertaining or easy to follow.
The question that arose for me was this: why should I care what happens to these people?? After two people walked out, I realised I didn't care, so I walked out as well.