Event

Mary Jane Regalado Presents: The Girls

Three Swedish stage actresses (Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom) give differing interpretations of the classic Aristophanes play "Lysistrata."

"In 1968, the notion of a film about ancient Greek women, starring three Swedish actresses, made by a neophyte female director who skipped out on her acting contract with a major Hollywood studio would have likely resulted in guffaws from the men in charge of making movies stateside. Now, some 40 years later, that response might still happen: you just don't see many "female" dominated films doing major business.

Thankfully, director Mai Zetterling (who also enjoyed a successful acting career -- you may remember her as the grandmother from Nicolas Roeg's The Witches) was able to pull off the impossible: The Girls (or "Flickorna", in Swedish) is a subversive film exploration of women that was made in the infancy of a cinematic movement that finally began to allow women to function onscreen in a realistic way, rather than like the glamorous Hollywood idea of "womanhood" that usually involved grueling hours in a make up chair. Surely at the time no American studio would have offered up a dime for such an offbeat film to be made, so thankfully the more forward thinking film financiers of Sweden stepped in to intervene." Pop Matters