The latest Swedish film to hurdle U.S. obscenity laws is Language of Love, a clinical excursion into pseudo sex education. Seized by customs agents in New York last year, Language was released by a U.S. court of appeals decision last week. In a witty opinion, Judge Leonard P. Moore explained why Americans who can endure the film are entitled to do so.
In Moore's words, Language "stars four of what are apparently leading Scandinavian sexual technocrats, with brilliant cameo roles for the functioning flesh of various unnamed actors." The pedigreed experts drone on about the psychology of orgasm while nude sexual acrobats perform illustrations. "It purports to be an animated Little Golden Book of marital relations," wrote Judge Moore, "or perhaps the Kama Sutra of electronic media, although the film is nowhere nearly as rich in the variety of its smorgasbord of delights as comparison with that ancient Hindu classic might suggest. It may be the vulgate scripture, the Popular Mechanics of interpersonal relations, marriage."
After viewing the film "in its tedious entirety," Judge Moore and his colleagues agreed that it was protected by the First Amendment because it fell far short of the Supreme Court's standards for obscenity. The prevailing doctrine requires 1) appeal to prurient interest as a dominant theme, 2) patent offensiveness and 3) utter lack of redeeming social value. Though Moore dryly noted that Language is unlikely to be viewed "primarily by marriage counselors and their patients in a professional setting," he found no predominant prurience in a film that treats intercourse with all the passion of an ag-school lecture on animal husbandry.
In determining redeeming social value, one criterion is whether or not the sex scenes advance the "ideas" of the film. Language is impeccable by that standard, Moore suggested, since sex is the idea. But what of patent offensiveness according to prevailing community standards? The judge wondered wistfully if such an innocuous film could even hope to hold its own on 42nd Street. "Judging by the current fare in New York," he observed, "this film is going to be hard-pressed to match the level of candor of its competition."