Summer Pleasure: Swedish Naturalist Painting in A Swedish Love Story

En Kärlekshistoria (A Swedish Love Story, Roy Andersson, 1970) is a unique film in a body of work known for its idiosyncrasy. Watching Roy Andersson’s debut feature in a retrospective amongst his other films is jarring; how does the same filmmaker who made the comically isolating Sånger från Andra Våningen (Songs from the Second Floor, 2000) also make a film as intimate and free-spirited as A Swedish Love Story? 

A Swedish Love Story follows Pär (Rolf Sohlman), a curly-haired teenage boy from the Swedish countryside who does all of the things teenage boys presumably did in 1970s Sweden: ride motorcycles aimlessly around the streets of Stockholm (in the Raggare tradition), listen to American pop music, play pinball with friends, and fall in love with girls. He meets Annika (Ann-Sofie Kylin), a young girl whose family lives in Stockholm and adheres to a strict and pleasureless life. Like Romeo and Juliet, the two teenagers from opposing families fall in love, and the lifestyles of their relatives begin to clash.

A Swedish Love Story was Andersson’s first feature out of film school. He was 27 when it was released, and its emphasis on youthful freedom is one that only a young filmmaker could capture. Andersson attributes his style in A Swedish Love Story to the Italian Neorealist films of Vittorio De Sica (particularly Ladri di Biciclette [Bicycle Thieves, 1948]) and the Czech New Wave films of Miloš Forman (particularly Lásky Jedné Plavovlásky [Loves of a Blonde, 1965]).¹ Although never explicitly mentioned by Andersson, the visual and thematic style of A Swedish Love Story seems to draw greatly from Swedish Naturalist painting.

Swedish Naturalism was a movement in painting that emerged around the turn of the 20th century and emphasised an interdependent bond between body and nature.² The Swedish countryside, where many of these paintings are set, was a location of organic beauty that produced a sense of vitalism, contrasting with the rise of industrialism. Oftentimes, these painters – which most famously included Anders Zorn, Richard Bergh, and Carl Larsson, among others – depicted human subjects embedded within a natural landscape, with a special emphasis on elemental qualities like water, earth, and the sun to elicit a sense of vitalistic life. Zorn’s paintings, for instance, depict humans – who are often nude as a way of portraying them in a completely natural state – near rocks, trees, water, and the sun’s light, giving equal importance to the landscape and the subject. Naturalism, as a broader concept, arose in response to the intense subjectivity of Romanticism and aimed instead to depict nature as it actually exists. Swedish Naturalism, specifically, emerged in response to the ongoing industrialisation of Sweden in the late 1800s.³ Michelle Facos, who refers to Swedish Naturalism as ‘National Romanticism’ in her book Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination, contextualises this commentary on industrialism:

…National Romanticism sought to transcend established boundaries, including the social constructs of class, the geographical constructs of regionalism, and the temporal constructs of history… Thus [it] rejected industrial capitalism, which was foreign, and developed a social utopian ethos that incorporated political, aesthetic, philosophical, scientific, economic, and psychological concerns… While they were articulated primarily by bourgeois intellectuals, ‘Swedishness’ in fact overrode class differences.⁴

A Swedish Love Story follows Swedish Naturalist painting’s thematic and political associations while also alluding to the movement’s visual style. Andersson establishes an interdependence between humans and nature to emphasise a sense of vitalism brought out by the landscape. This is exemplified by a scene in which Annika and Pär are walking through a forest in the countryside; they stop and embrace, with the orange haze of the sunset shining upon them. Andersson depicts the subject – a unification of figures – as interrelated with the nature enveloping them, cementing a vitalist bond between all living organisms. An emotionally liberating act of love, Annika and Pär’s embrace creates a vertical geometry mirroring the surrounding trees. This image echoes an earlier scene in which Annika and Pär embrace amidst a barren field of dirt, an image that has become emblematic of A Swedish Love Story through posters and online aesthetic collages. A chain-link fence placed in the close foreground emphasises the distance between camera and subject, which, in conjunction with the muted colour palette, elicits a sense of isolation, reflecting the cold attitude of the city as a manifestation of capitalism. As inverses of each other, these two scenes exemplify the contrast between the Naturalist countryside and industrial cityscape.

Andersson also recontextualises Swedish Naturalism’s critique of capitalism within postwar Sweden. Annika’s father, fridge salesman John (Bertil Norström), bluntly describes Andersson’s perspective on industrial capitalism: “Money! Money! Money! That’s all that matters in this goddamned world!” John is suffocated by the desire to validate his self-perception of success, which is converted into a cold and strict attitude toward his family. Andersson contrasts this with the openness and warmth of Pär’s family, which initiates John’s self-reflection on the lack of importance in his role as a salesman (as Pär’s father tells John, “We’ll go catch a fish later, fresh from the lake. Who needs a fridge?”). Through this comparison, Andersson follows the Naturalist painters’ rejection of capitalism in favour of a social and agrarian, yet nonetheless modern, culture. Ultimately, a commonality of love and empathy is found between the two families, suggesting a bridging of the broader divide between political lifestyles.

It should be noted that Ingmar Bergman was also strongly inspired by Swedish Naturalism in films such as Sommaren med Monika (Summer with Monika, 1953) and Sommarlek (Summer Interlude, 1951). Although Andersson and Bergman both recontextualised the themes of Naturalist painting to explore industrial Sweden after World War II, they differ on the level of politics. Bergman utilised the contrast between the suffocating lifestyle of the city and the liberating affordances of the countryside to communicate a traditionalist desire for an older model of living. Andersson, on the other hand, utilises a similar Naturalist style in favour of a complete rejection of industrial capitalism, focusing instead on building a modern society around empathy and community. Andersson, who was Bergman’s student at the Swedish Film Institute Film School, famously denounced Bergman’s right-wing advocacy against depicting anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, which cemented a divide between the two and led to Andersson calling Bergman “almost a fascist” and “a Nazi sympathizer.”⁵ 

Andersson’s reference to Naturalist painting in A Swedish Love Story directly contrasts with the style found in the rest of his filmography. He has come to be known for his isolating and tableau style, influenced by the writing of André Bazin and Bertolt Brecht, and the paintings of Dutch Renaissance artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The atmosphere of sterile artificiality in a film like Songs from the Second Floor, conveyed through wide-angle lenses, deep focus, and a lack of camera movement, couldn’t be more visually different from the neorealist aesthetics of A Swedish Love Story. That being said, even if Andersson never truly returned to the visual style of Swedish Naturalism, the one aspect that has stayed consistent throughout his career has been his sharp critique of class and capitalism.

En Kärlekshistoria / A Swedish Love Story (1970 Sweden 115 minutes) 

Prod Co: Europa Film Sweden Prod: Waldemar Bergendahl, Rune Hjelm Dir, Scr: Roy Andersson Phot: Jörgen Persson Ed: Kalle Boman Mus: Björn Isfält

Cast: Ann-Sofie Kylin, Rolf Sohlman, Anita Lindblom, Bertil Norström, Lennart Tellfeldt, Margreth Weivers, Arne Andersson, Björn Andrésen

Endnotes