Anita: Swedish Nymphet

Everyone has to start somewhere. And for Stellan Skarsgård – erstwhile star of Good Will Hunting and The Avengers – that start came in 1970s Scandinavia. One of his earliest roles was in Anita: Swedish Nymphet, the supposedly true story of a 17-year-old sex addict. Does the film give us a hint of the talents Skarsgård possessed, or is it a film he’d gladly erase from his CV?

Anita (Christina Lindberg) is a precocious 16-year-old with just one thing on her mind: sex. Totally consumed by her desires, Anita’s relationships with those around her are falling apart, her education is in ruins and she repeatedly places herself in dangerous situations. She is continually and ruthlessly used by predatory men – a situation she is not altogether unhappy with.

When Erik (Skarsgård), a psychology student, literally stumbles into Anita’s life, they form a fledgling relationship. She appreciates the gentle support he offers, he sees himself as the caring influence she so badly needs – and spies an opportunity to test his academic skills on her. As she opens up to Erik, she confesses some of the shocking and sordid affairs she’s been involved in – and these are played out in flashback.

When Anita moves into the student commune where Erik lives, the pair come closer to uncovering the real reasons for her nymphomania. Will her journey of self-discovery lead to happiness?

Anita: Swedish Nymphet is an ugly film. Presumably transferring the film stock to digital has caused some light loss. From the very outset, the film is extremely dark and some scenes are obscured entirely by blackness. Add to that a series of deeply unattractive characters clad in brown and grey clothing and the movie is hardly a visual treat.

Thankfully, the titular character is anything but ugly. Christina Lindberg is a beautiful woman – and she needs to be given how much of the movie’s running time is devoted to focusing on her naked body. There are numerous scenes of her disrobing, dancing and wiggling naked across the screen. Her womanly curves are at odds with her sweet, childlike face in a way which is slightly disconcerting.

Not as disconcerting, however, as the film’s sexual content. There’s absolutely nothing explicit here – just boobs, bums and vast quantities of pubic hair – but the sex scenes still make for uncomfortable viewing. Anita takes no pleasure from her trysts. They are filmed joylessly and almost wordlessly, and although the ‘action’ is usually obscured from view, it’s clear that what goes unseen is devoid of feeling – save for the aftermath in which Anita is usually seen weeping or staring lifelessly into space.

These episodes are linked by Anita’s scenes with Erik. Told as flashbacks, they illustrate the depth of her despair as Erik attempts to make sense of her condition. His cod-psychology, however, never rings true. Any layman could devise such simplistic theories and it’s difficult to take the character seriously. There’s not a lot more Skarsgård could do with the part, but it’s hard not to draw unfavourable comparisons with his performance as Prof. Gerald Lambeau in Good Will Hunting.

Quite how much of Anita: Swedish Nymphet is genuinely based on a true story is questionable. There are certainly some scenes which would be deeply disturbing were they true. One such set-piece occurs when Anita is giving a performance for her father’s work colleagues. With her mother accompanying her at the piano, she sings for the group of men only to end up stripping and performing naked for the leering men as her parents look on. It might be a strong hint as to where her troubled mindset originated – but the film never explores this deeply enough.

Instead, the diagnosis for her problem is finally arrived at by Erik. There’s more than a hint of Linda Lovelace’s Deepthroat about the diagnosis – and Anita sets out to solve the problem with relish. It makes for a rather absurd final act full of twists and about turns which seem like a box-ticking exercise rather than an attempt to tell any kind of story. You can almost imagine the money men’s cries: “No lesbianism yet? What do you mean there are no scenes in a strip club? Rectify this immediately! And get her a dildo!”

Anita: Swedish Nymphet is a failure on all fronts. It’s neither salacious nor camp enough to be entertaining, not gritty or hard-hitting enough to move the audience, nor detailed enough to be a convincing character study. Instead, it’s a peculiar period piece from a less permissive era: where once it would have shocked, now it’s just shocking. Unless you have a predilection for moustaches and bare bottoms, this is one to avoid.

Bare Behind Bars

After initially been banned in the UK, Oswaldo de Oliviera’s lesbian prison flick Bare Behind Bars has now been passed for a DVD release following 95 seconds of cuts to remove scenes of fellatio and penetration. So what remains of the Brazilian’s sexploitation movie?

The storyline of Bare Behind Bars, such as it is, concerns an all-female prison in Brazil, the corrupt governor, an escape plan and a nymphomaniac nurse. It’s not a film which is overly concerned with plot or character development (the vast majority of the characters are not even given names), but would rather concentrate instead on a number of set-pieces.

What flimsy plot there is centres on a formulaic escape plot and the predictable aftermath. With the prison being run by an evil – and unhinged – governor, death, solitary confinement and punishment beatings are every day occurrences. It’s little wonder that, led by a new inmate, the prisoners are desperate to break out. Along the way there are appearances from lusty nurses and sadistic guards – and there’s barely a male character who doesn’t get laid. Typically clichéd scenes include the shakedown, trouble in the exercise yard and inmates escaping in terrible disguises…

The tone is set from the outset as busty prison staff chew their pencils whilst their unbuttoned blouses gape to reveal their suntanned cleavages. It’s immediately apparent that things will become sleazier as a relatively harmless basketball game is broken up by water-hose wielding prison staff. Predictably, the flimsy uniforms of the inmates are soon see-through (or removed altogether) as the audience is treated to their first display of gratuitous nudity. The aftermath shows what seems to be some indiscriminate whipping and torturing of seemingly innocent women. It’s a confused opening which fails to make any dramatic impact.

What is made clear is that the prison governor (Maria Stella Splondore) is a nasty piece of work. Her callous nature, insistence on using prisoners’ numbers rather than names, as well as her casual attitude to torture, point to her as being the villain of the piece early on. Despite her wooden performance, and some truly awful dubbing, it’s also made perfectly apparent that she’s mentally unstable. This is achieved by Splondore ending each of her scenes by narrowing her eyes and staring evilly into the middle distance.

Following a search of the cells, a prisoner is discovered with a cut-throat razor secreted inside of her. The removal of this introduces us to arguably Bare Behind Bars’ most interesting (yet preposterous) character: the nurse. Played with relish by Marta Anderson, she’s a sex-addicted ether junkie who supplies inmates with weapons after inventing tenuous excuses to get them alone in her office. Despite being utterly one-dimensional, she’s at least funny – and some light relief is much needed.

As the governor becomes more and more unhinged, she begins a relationship with a sexually rapacious newcomer, and becomes increasingly reliant on alcohol and drugs. Sensing an opportunity to usurp her boss, another guard begins to elbow her way into power. It’s just another example of an underdeveloped character in a dead-end subplot. Further inexplicable strands of the storyline concern a girl being held in solitary confinement (who still manages to have a sexual relationship through a hatch in the door), a delivery man who delivers more than just dry goods, and an utterly bizarre sex slave/prostitution story.

There’s little to admire about Bare Behind Bars. It’s clear that very few of the cast have ever acted before. Performances are unconvincing at best and often appalling. Worse still is the direction. De Oliviera seems convinced that naked women love being naked whilst bouncing and giggling – they do so in the exercise yard, in the shower, and in their cells. It’s a fantastic way of making women’s feminine assets wiggle and jiggle (which is obviously the intention) but a poor way of convincing a watching audience that anyone in the scene was really having any fun. Allied to the accompanying squealing and wailing, it’s an excruciating experience.

The sex scenes are almost as bad, consisting as they do of varying degrees of passionless dry humping and frottage, some vigorous groping of breasts, and some quite vicious kissing. Even scenes of masochistic whippings are half-hearted – the protagonists look like they’d rather be using their whips as skipping ropes than using them to inflict pain. It seems absurd that a film so obsessed with the representation of sex does it so badly.

Even worse is to come, though, as the film unravels completely in the final act. As even the excruciating sex scenes dry up, there is little left other than some exploitative nudity, some utterly predictable ‘plot developments’, and some particularly unconvincing editing – including one sequence which uses at least eight consecutive clumsy cross-fades. It’s remarkable that a film so uninteresting can become even more boring as it limps to its inevitable conclusion.

It’s hard to understand who the target audience for this release is. In an age where sexually explicit material is available at the click of a mouse, it seems that even the dirty mac brigade would struggle to find a use for this DVD. It’s badly scripted, clumsily directed, terribly acted and utterly clichéd. Worse still, it’s interminably boring.