Night Games. Mai Zetterling is a Swedish cinemactress who in middle age has ventured to look through the other end of the lens. In Loving Couples she saw Sweden as the land of the midnight fun. In Night Games she sees it as a heap of moral garbage. The film as a result made a certain stink at this year's film festivals. At Venice it was banned from public showing, at San Francisco it was berated as "pornography for profit." The statement was made by Shirley Temple, a critic with rather frivolous credentials, but it is essentially correct.
Night Games is ostensibly the case history of a mother complex. The man who has it (Keve Hjelm), a wealthy young Swede, revisits the house he grew up in and invites a moral conflict between the memory of his profligate mother (Ingrid Thulin) and the love of his innocent fiancee (Lena Brundin). In a series of what might be called flesh-backs, the man-as-boy (Jorgen Lindstrom) wanders in memory through a child's garden of sexual reverses. Among the obscene scenes: his mother summoning a crowd of drunken guests into her bedroom and letting them watch while she gives birth to a dead baby; his mother, between sensual caresses, telling him "what a nice litt'e thing" he has and then slapping him angrily when he masturbates in her bed; his mother sneering coldly when he dresses himself in her clothes, daubs himself with her rouge, and pathetically attempts to provoke her appetite.
Director Zetterling's style reveals her as a cinemagpie. Her symbols are bad Bergman, her decor is awful Ophuls, her decadence is phony Fellini. When in doubt, she bares somebody's breasts; when inspired, she mounts an orgy. Her episodes redound with explicit detail, and frame by frame they are morbidly fascinating to look at. Unfortunately, the frames add up to nothing more than an album of porny photographs, and they do these things better in France. Or even in Tijuana.