NiGHT GAMES (1966)

Jan brings his fiancée to his childhood mansion in an attempt to exorcise some psychological demons, mostly involving his late mother with whom he had an unusual and intense relationship. Jan and his fiancée Mariana walk through the house as Jan relives painful memories from the past. The film jolts back and forth between the present day, with Jan apparently struggling with sexual and emotional blockages, and the past, as we see the much younger Jan growing up with his mother Irene in a house full of bizarre hangers-on. The movie opens with a freakish gang of partygoers celebrating Irene's delivery of a stillborn child, and things get weirder from there. Many of the scenes feel inspired by the films of Bergman and Fellini, but the proceedings are empty and I never felt much of anything for Jan and his struggles. The movie, directed by Mai Zetterling, was presented at Cannes and shown in private for the judges; later when it was entered in the San Francisco film festival, Shirley Temple, who was on the festival's board, resigned, protesting that it was "pornography for profit." (Isn’t all pornography produced for profit? And most non-pornographic movies as well?) Contemporary reviews mention "orgies," though most of those scenes are just of busy, debauched parties. But one sequence that did make me a bit queasy involves the 12-year-old Jan (played by the 15-year-old Jorgen Lindstrom, also the young boy in Bergman's PERSONA) lying in bed in a nightshirt with his mother; he begins masturbating under the covers and when his mother pulls the covers down to punish him, we see his genitals. Making the scene that explicit actually worked against its effectiveness by pulling me out of the narrative, startled to see what I saw. Ingrid Thulin gives a good performance as the overbearing mother, but Keve Hjelm is listless and uninteresting as the adult Jan. If you stick with it, the ending is satisfying, even if I don’t actually believe that the final event would be effective in the long term as an exorcism. Pictured are Hjelm as Jan and Lena Brundin as Mariana. [Criterion Channel]