Pipsqueak Plautus

To Love. They meet at her husband's funeral, and it's lust at first sight. She (Harriet Andersson) is a young Swedish widow whose husband left much to be desired. He (Zbigniew Cybulski) is a young Stockholm travel agent who looks like what she needs. "I might want to go south," she sighs receptively. "I might give you a ring," he mutters as he looks her over. When the mourners go home, she skips off to her bedroom, rips off her clothes, flips on a station that plays jazz jazz jazz. Her mother protests: "Hardly decent, is it?" Hardly. Many moviegoers, in fact, will find this picture downright scandalous. But Director Jorn Donner is not prurient; he is Priapic. He does not play the facts of life for sniggers; he displays them, like some pipsqueak Plautus, for grand though gross guffaws.

The travel agent reappears with irreverent celerity. He draws the widow's hand toward him across the kitchen table, suddenly bends to kiss it, just as suddenly discovers the hand withdrawn and his lips pressed tenderly to a table mat. The next frame, however, finds them bouncing around on her bed, and for the next 80 minutes they hardly ever leave it--except to hurry over and bounce around on his bed. Sometimes they bounce all over the floor. Sometimes they bounce blindfolded. Once they land somehow in a large wooden chest . . . and discreetly lower the lid.

"Dear," she asks at one point in a worried little voice, "do you think we're abnormal?" Whatever anybody else may say, Director Donner most emphatically thinks his lovers are normal, magnificently normal. Sex breaks open the ground of their lives and in it plants the seed of love. The final scenes are subtly realized and beautifully touching, but in one of them Director Donner, a 31-year-old protege of Ingmar Bergman, unfortunately promulgates one of those long long thoughts of youth that may mildly embarrass him when he gets older. Marriage, his heroine announces earnestly, is merely a "lesson in resignation"; the only true love is free love. Oh, well. In a movie like this, what's one anticlimax?

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