a woman betrayed
by Douglas Messerli
Hasse Ekman (screenwriter and director) Flicka
och hyacinter (Girl with Hyacinths) / 1950
A young woman playing at the piano at a party
where the attendees seem somewhat drunk and sexually involved, suddenly stops
playing midway through a phrase. We see her soon after looking into the dark
waters of a canal, as if contemplating a jump. A passing street artist warns
her it’s not worth it and offers her a sketch. She gives him some money but
leaves before accepting his
art. The next morning her maid finds the woman
hanging from a ceiling hook.
Having left everything to Anders and Britt Wikner (Ulf Palme and Birgit
Tengroth), her neighbors who live across from her apartment, they begin an
investigation into why the woman they hardly knew has committed suicide. For
the rest of this film, Flicka och hyacinter (Girl with Hyacinths)
focuses, in the manner of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, on attempting to
discover who this beautiful but apparently inscrutable woman was and why her
life ended as it did. Like Welles’ great film, Girl with Hyacinths,
directed by Hasse Ekman, provides us with a secret answer to the puzzle which
only one of his characters solves at film’s end.
The amazing thing about this film is not its final narrative solution,
however, but just how remarkable are Ekman’s images and cinematic strategies,
proving him the equal of his Swedish friend and peer Ingmar Bergman, along with
its fascinating psychological insights and the fact that Ekman would have
chosen to focus on a seemingly ordinary woman with the intensity and
persistence as if she were of major interest to the culture at large.
Strangely, Dagmar Brink (Eva Henning, Ekman’s wife at the time) is
worthy of that interest for a reason that perhaps until the date of this film,
1950, no director had previously explored—her sexual preference. I’m going to
do something that no other critic has ever dared to do, to tell my readers in
the fourth paragraph of my review-essay that what we discover by the end of
this film is that Dagmar committed suicide, in part, because she was a lesbian.
If
that may immediately alienate most of my LGBTQ readers, seemingly representing
as it does yet another occasion where the homosexual figure of a film is forced
to suffer and die because of her or his sexual identity, I want to assure you
that it is for that very reason that I am presenting the facts up front. For
although the film’s characters, many critics, and some viewers might remain
obstinately obtuse throughout the film, the director gives obvious signals to
his knowledgeable gay viewers right from the start about Dagmar’s private life.
And by the end we realize that Ekman’s presentation of her is not only
sympathetic but that her suicide was not caused by her lesbian identification
but because she was betrayed by all of her lovers, male and female, both
personally and in the case of her lesbian friend, politically. Unlike Martha
Dobie of William Wyler’s The Children’s Hour of a decade later, Dagmar
Brink did not hang herself out of fear for having realized her lesbian desires,
but for having so loved someone, in this case a woman who has lived under the
Nazi occupation in Paris (Anne-Marie Brunius), that her abandonment of their
love and country has sent this film’s central character into a despondency so
absolute that she simply no longer wishes to go on living.
The
very fact that this director feels that the consequences of that love are worth
devoting a hour and a half of our lives testifies to his respect for LGBTQ life
in a manner that almost no other director before him evidenced.
Ekman himself, it appears, can hardly wait to reveal the secret we
perceive him purposely withholding in order to gain and keep our interest.
Probably if he had truly announced at the beginning of his film that his hero
is queer, most viewers of the day would never have bothered to watch the rest
of this significantly engaging work of art. But he certainly tosses us more
than a few breadcrumbs to lead us to the truth quite early in the film.
Upon first learning about their unexpected and somewhat unwanted
inheritance, the Witners explore the now empty apartment next door, finding
little of anything to explain her death. Looking over her library, Anders
comments that she seems to be reading the kind of literature one might expect
of such a person: Boye, Gullberg, and Södergran.
Perhaps Ekman is being rather coy in mentioning these three Swedish-language
poets; even most of his Swedish audience might not immediately have known of
their work. But Karin Boye, I happen to know, was a lesbian poet and novelist
who committed suicide. Gullberg, probably a gay poet, who wrote significant
anti-war poetry, suffered for years from a neuromuscular disease, and also
committed suicide. He also wrote a poem about Boye, entitled “Dead Amazon”:
Swords that battle crushing powers
Will be broken, thrust aside
News reports say German forces
Breached Thermopylae and passed
Forty-year old Karin Boye
Is missing from her home, feared lost.
Very dark, with big brown eyes
Dressed in travel clothes, it’s said
Maybe finding beyond eons
Where no one other found the trail
The pass where Sparta’s heroes fought
And chose their death but did not yield.
Södergran, a Swedish-speaking Finnish poet, is also thought to have been
bisexual and suffered for much of her life from tuberculosis. And she is,
moreover, recognized as one of Scandinavia’s first feminist writers. Here’s a
few lines from one of her most renowned poems:
Vierge Moderne
I am no woman. I am a neuter.
I am a child, a page-boy, and a bold decision,
I am a laughing streak of a scarlet sun...
I am a net for all voracious fish,
I am a toast to every woman's honor,
I am a step toward luck and toward ruin,
I am a leap in freedom and the self...
I am the whisper of desire in a man's ear,
I am the soul's shivering, the flesh's longing
and denial,
I am an entry sign to new paradises.
I am a flame, searching and brave,
I am water, deep yet bold only to the knees,
I am fire and water, honestly combined, on
free terms... *
Anders, who identifies these writers, is himself a writer so you might
imagine that he at least had read these poets. But apparently not, or his male
simple-mindedness cannot make the obvious connections between literature and
this woman’s life. He, meanwhile, goes on an engaging wild goose-chase
encountering first a banker who hesitatingly admits that she had visited him,
subtly blackmailing him with the fact that she knows he was her father,
demanding 5,000 kroner, which he grudgingly pays.
Later Anders and Britt are visited by Dagmar’s first husband, Captain
Brink (Keve Hjelm), who evidently spotted the couple at Dagmar’s funeral. He
seems a particularly dense man, who shortly after their marriage, one day when
she returned late, opened a letter to her from Paris from someone named Alex
claiming to love Dagmar and recalling the hours they spent together. When she
returns, the radio announces the news of Nazi occupation of Paris, clearly as
frightening information for Dagmar as it is for Rick and
Ilsa in Casablanca. Her response to the radio speaks of her horror:
“They’re vile,” whereas he argues, “But they’re good soldiers.” Aghast by his
comments—the first time when her beliefs are betrayed—she is further shocked
when he carries it even further: “That rotten and corrupted France needs some
cleaning up,” she responding, “You sound like a Nazi!”
Angered by what he has discovered, he asks her to honestly tell him if
she has had another relationship. She says quite openly: “I have never loved a
man before you, Stefan.” But, as he tells the Wikners, he cannot understand why
she lied to him. Again, from the paternalistic view that dominates this film,
apparently no male might ever bother to wonder whether Alex was a male or
female name. In any event, the doubt sown by that letter soon results in their
separation.
Yet we do see Britt wondering if there might be something more to the
incident. She clearly knows a bit more about Alex from a time before her
marriage to Anders when, living in the same apartment, she feared that Dagmar
was about to commit suicide. Worried, she intruded upon her neighbor, insisting
that the girl take a sleeping pill and think on her situation before acting. To
make sure the girl is safe, she stays on until Dagmar falls to sleep, hearing
her declare that she loves Alex.
Sharing this now with Anders, the two realize that perhaps Captain Brink
was right in his assessment that she had lied to him to protect her lover.
Anders fails a couple of times in contacting an artist to whom Dagmar
was somehow connected because of that figure’s continual drunkenness, each time
resulting in a series of comic incidents in what otherwise is a rather dark
movie. But when he finally does meet up with the artist Elias Körner, he discovers another of the failed human
beings whom Dagmar loved. Körner, having long spotted her at the Ritz where she
played piano, asks her to sit for the portrait which provides this movie with its
title, “Girl with Hyacinths,” perhaps his best work ever.
The two eventually join up and spend delightful weeks together before he
once more falls into his cyclic pattern of severe alcoholism, ending in his
long periods of disappearance and even, when the police arrest him,
incarceration. After several of these “cycles,” she is finally convinced that
if he cannot permanently become sober their relationship will have to end. To
send him to a sanatorium she produces, without him knowing the source—although
we know that she has gotten the money from the banker—enough money to keep him
in the institution until he is cured. He returns home and they live together in
happiness until, once again, he comes home drunken and argumentative, purposely
destroying their relationship.
Suffering from the breakup, she meets up with a singer, Willy Borge
(Karl-Arne Holmsten), whom she had met one time before, admiring his music but
recognizing that he is a total cad, determined to have nothing to do with him
sexually. Coincidentally, Anders went to school with Borge and recognizes him
as a perfect scoundrel, surprised that Dagmar even had his records in her
collection. It’s that connection which leads him to Borges where we see the
final scenes of this moral drama played out.
Running into her again, after her breakup with Elias, Borge invites
Dagmar back to his apartment where he is planning a party with a couple of
women who have returned home from Paris. Of course one of these women is the
now infamous Alex with her new red-haired girlfriend. At this event, moreover,
Alex slowly reveals that during the occupation she worked for the Nazis,
claiming she had no choice...and after all her German was good and...she always
loved Germans. When she hooks up with Borge for sex it is at that very moment
when Dagmar ceases playing the piano and leaves the room, the scene with which
this film has begun.
Much like the works of Norwegian post-war novelist Sigurd Hoel, Ekman’s
work plays out a complex tale of betrayal, of love of course, but even worse,
in a near a treasonous act, a betrayal of moral values. Dagmar has witnessed
that betrayal at least three times and cannot bear to go in a world where both
men and women have become such creatures.
For Anders the story is over without a proper ending, without a full
explanation for the series of events. But his wife suspects the truth, calling
up Borge to find out the name of the women he went to bed with that
night—Alexandria of course.
She doesn’t tell her husband. Perhaps the male species cannot be trusted
with such a deep truth. But in 1950 Hasse Ekman felt he could rely on his
audience to comprehend that what was wrong with the world in which Dagmar Brink
lived was not that she loved another woman but that she had chosen an immoral
one.
For those who repeat the myth that the 1950s represented only views of
domesticity, racism, xenophobia, and moral righteousness, I’d invite you to
enter my view of that decade which would include this film, Michael Curtiz’ Young
Man with a Horn, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Les Enfants terribles, Jean
Genet’s Un chant d’amour, Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train,
Jacqueline Audry’s Oliva, Jacques Demy’s Les horizons mort, John
Schmitz Voices, Federico Fellini’s I vitelloni, François Reichenbach Last Spring,
Marcel Carné’s L’Air de Paris, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les
Diaboliques, Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, Nicolas Ray’s Rebel
without a Cause, Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion, Mauro Bolognini’s La
notte brava, everything by or based on Tennessee Williams, along with the
poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, early John Ashbery, John Wieners, and
so very much else that belies the notion that the decade was only involved in
family television stereotypes and House on Un-American Activities’ atrocities.
Hasse Ekman’s film might almost be said to be the gateway, along with Genet’s Chant,
of a new era of LGBTQ awareness, so very long before Stonewall.
*The poem I quote from here is from Love
& Solitude, translated by Stina Katchadourain, published by Fjord Press
in 1992.
Los Angeles, June 11, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June
2021).
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