GIRL WITH HYACINTHS (1950)

Lovely young Dagmar is playing piano one night at a small party. She seems depressed and after a couple of interactions with guests, she leaves for home, seeming almost suicidal as she looks longingly into a dark river from a bridge. A man passes by noticing her mood and says, "Don’t let it worry you; he's not worth it." She replies, "There is no he." At her apartment, she slumps into a chair and stares at an empty lamp hook on the ceiling. The next morning, she is found dead, having hung herself from the lamp hook. Her neighbors across the hall, writer Anders and his wife Britt, are told she left a note leaving her possessions to them. Intrigued partly because they didn't really know her all that well, they begin an investigation into her life and the possible reason she committed suicide. At her funeral he talks to a rather cold man, a banker, who might be her father and whom Dagmar's mother tried to blackmail over his possible paternity. He finds other people from her past life including Gullan, an actress who befriended Dagmar on a lonely Christmas Eve; Korner, an alcoholic struggling artist who painted a portrait of her (from which the film's title comes); and Willy Borge, a crooner who gave copies of his albums to all his lovers and says that she came from a generation that would "rather jump out a window than acknowledge our need for tenderness." Anders and Britt also meet Dagmar's former husband, a soldier named Brink. He says despite being married to her for four years, he felt he never knew her. He read a letter he found to her from a former lover named Alex, but because Dagmar insisted that there had been no other man before him, Brink felt he could not trust her and they divorced. It seems like Dagmar is going to remain a cipher to Anders as she was to most of the people who knew her, but in the end, Britt discovers the truth.

[Major spoiler follows] Though I'm disappointed that the Criterion Channel has bought into the teasing overuse of the phrase 'film noir' and included this Swedish movie, directed by Hasse Ekman, in a collection called Nordic Noir, I'm pleased to have been able to see it. Much is made of this film's narrative similarity to Citizen Kane, in that it is a search for the secret to a dead person's identity through a series of flashbacks triggered by people from the past. The sometimes stunning shadowy visual style also borrows from Kane which I think is why the noir label has been attached to this. But most of the defining themes of noir are not present. Interestingly, though Kane's 'Rosebud' doesn't really explain Kane, Dagmar's Rosebud moment at the end does, at least on the surface, explain her death. Britt discovers that Dagmar's mysterious Alex from the past was not a man but a woman; Dagmar encountered her at the party seen at the beginning and we see that scene again at the end, able to piece together at least a cursory explanation for the suicide. Apparently, Swedish audiences from 1950 went home from this movie largely unaware of what the ending meant given the absence of gay and lesbian signifiers in pop culture. Viewers today will probably pick up on the gay subtext along the way, though the ending still has a nice frisson to it. The acting is excellent throughout. Eva Henning's Dagmar (pictured)  has a melancholy tinge though she also manages to come off as both simple and complex, as both transparent and mysterious. Ulf Palme (Anders) and Birgit Tengroth (Britt) are nicely grounded as a pleasant, average couple and their scenes together are light in tone. Anders Ek is eccentric as the artist and Keve Hjelm is sympathetic as the ex-husband, despite a moment when he expresses admiration for the Nazis. Highly recommended, though not as a film noir. [Criterion Channel]