Maid in Sweden

Original 70's movie poster.

"Maid in Sweden tells the story of Inga, a 16-year-old Swedish girl who leaves her rural home to spend a weekend in the Swedish capital. An innocent with no experience, but with prodigious physical attributes, she has a series of romantic adventures as she throws off the frustrations of her small-town environment"

Twenty-one year old Christina Lindberg plays the repressed Swedish schoolgirl with overbearing parents who springs a visit on her independent sister Greta (Monica Ekman.) This pisses off Greta's live-in boyfriend Carsten (Krister Ekman.) Inga unintentionally shows a bit of tit on the train over, then spends the day with her sister. Inga, Greta and Carsten all hit the hash hukkah, then the deeply stoned older sister confesses that she's living in sin. Inga agrees to keep her mouth shut, then it's off to bed. Inga dreams of a couple screwing around in a hall, then two near rapes of her person, one sapphic. None of this is particularly titillating or believable. Inga finally wakes up to spy on her sister having completely unconvincing hippy freakout sex with her boyfriend while their static pelvises are in separate zip codes. Inga eventually returns to her room to motion in the general vicinity of her own genitalia.

Countryside litte sister meets urban grown sister.

The trio go ice skating, because what the fuck else do you do in Sweden besides get high, get laid, and attempt suicide-- all somehow involving god damned snow, hot chocolate, and the Aryan ideal. Carsten acts like a dick, giving Inga a hard time about being a goody-two-shoes. Carsten is convinced by Greta to hook Inga up with a date with his rapist buddy. Next morning, everything's hunky-dory, and we're off on another montage with a softcore porn Eurofag pop vocal score, with bonus bicycling. We're nearly an hour in, and that's all we have to show for it? Heil the hell long is this thing, anyway?

Nighttime is the right time for simulated "artistically" lit cunnilingus where you can't see anything. Sis is worried. Country rock montage walk through the woods. Sneaking back in. Dick boyfriend makes Inga call sis at work to say she's okay. Inga takes a shower. Inga sneaks out on her last night in town to fuck the date rapist one more time. She's a meaty old school Playmate and he's lean and firm for a dude, making for some awkward pauses as the viewer tries to figure out whose ass they're checking out. Inga sneaks back in. Dick boyfriend brings dick to bear against Inga, who accommodates all too quickly. Big sis busts them both in the bathtub. Inga is sent packing.

No wonder she made it on the casting.

Her talents.

As I mentioned, there's some artistic posturing, but when the cameraman casts a shadow, craft goes out the window. The acting is bad in that way you only get when you force an entire cast of amateurs to read dialogue in a non-native tongue. Then again, maybe it was all ad-libbed from an outline, because the script couldn't have been longer that a few double-spaced pages. Even the sex scenes are incompetent, the bare minimum standard for this sort of drivel. Only the most die hard fans of Christina Lindberg's anatomy should get near this thing.

Poor farm girl on the wrong side of town.

Big Sister's suave mate.

The DVD image quality is that of a black market bootleg. Maid in Sweden has pretty clearly been sourced from an ancient video master, one that's cropped enough to leave a lot of the movie looking awfully cramped and even manages to lop the sides off some of the opening credits. It's been transferred from a print rather than the usual sparkling negative materials, riddled with specks, reel change marks, and a hell of a lot of damage. Virtually all traces of color have been drained away, and contrast is anemic throughout. Some edge enhancement has been tossed on to try to compensate for the soft, murky image -- which is pretty much an indiscernable mess in several scenes -- but these weak stabs at trying to polish such a poor master never really work. The video has kind of an unstable, slightly wobbly appearance at times, which is particularly glaring in an early scene where the tiles on the kitchen wall look like they're vibrating. Yeah, I know a Swedish softcore flick shot on a shoestring forty years ago isn't ever going to look that great, but Maid in Sweden is in the running as one of the worst DVDs I've ever seen. Unless every possible film element has been destroyed, I can't think of much of any excuse for a legitimate DVD release to have turned out this awful. 

 

The monaural soundtrack isn't any better. The audio -- awkwardly delivered in English, in case you were wondering -- is painfully shrill and marred by a persistent hiss in the background. The levels vary wildly from scene to scene, occasionally leaving the dialogue pretty much impossible to make out over the music. A shopping trip in the city and Inga's dinner date have it the worst. The bass is kind of overcooked, giving me a headache when I had to crank up the volume to try to suss out the inane, pointless dialogue. Awful, awful, awful.  

The climax scene were Inga proves she's a mean slut.

An original swedish movie promo poster.

The DVD does include a newly-recorded ten minute interview with Lindberg, but it's pretty amateurish as well. It's 100% raw footage, not edited at all, leaving in a slew of awkward pauses and ends abruptly as the camera is in the middle of being put away. Lindberg talks about how Maid in Sweden was her first film role, shot while she was still in school. The movie was financed by Americans and, despite the title, wasn't ever screened in Sweden; she hadn't even seen Maid in Sweden until shortly before this interview was shot, more than thirty-five years after it was filmed. Lindberg also speaks briefly about her co-stars, explicit sex scenes she really doesn't remember filming, Inga's similarity to many of her other early roles, and how funny she thinks it is that she was cast in the part seeing as how she doesn't look all that Swedish. It's a kind of clumsy interview, but if you're devoted enough to want to suffer through the movie, I'm sure you'll still find this worth a look.

A battered anamorphic widescreen trailer (3 min.) rounds out the extras. 
 

To finish today's entry, as usual here's the movie trailer:



And just in case you have the time for sassiness  here's an old edit of the film: