VIOLETS ARE BLUE

Violer er blà

Director Peter Refn / 1975 / Denmark

Peter Refn's first feature-length film bears a strong resemblance to Eric Rohmer's contes moraux. It centres on the conflict between a romantic view of love and a more basic, sexual conception.

Mille (Lisbeth Lundquist) appears as a liberated woman, working as a television journalist and living with an introverted Norwegian scientist, John. He tries, unsuccessfully, to understand her indulgence in outside relationships. When she goes off with her friends Suzanne and Lisa (who works in a massage parlour), he becomes jealous. Mille also goes out with her homosexual friend Uffe, with whom she goes to bars to pick up strange men for one night stands.

John becomes more anguished as his relationship with Mille breaks down. She meets a young lawyer at a party and they have an intense affair. But she discovers, too late, that she has committed herself to the wrong decisions.

'The film mingles the frivolous and the dramatic quite deliberately and alternates between long, contrived, almost literary conversations and entirely relaxed and apparently improvised scenes. It contains self-irony and is yet engaged, and in its criticism of ingrained prejudices manages to be both semi-pornographic and semi-'socialistic'.'

International Film Guide, 1976

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