Night Games (1966) User Reviews

Angst and sexual repression in downbeat, risqué film

[debblyst · 6/10 · 18 November 2003]

Jan (Keve Hjelm) fights impotence (literal and symbolic) and anguished childhood memories in a decadent Swedish castle where risqué parties and daring scenes defy 1960s' movie censorship, reaffirming the ground-breaking role of Swedish films in helping advance adult, sexually concerned themes in international cinema (q.v. Bergman's "Through a Glass Darkly", "The Silence" and "Persona", Vilgot Sjöman's "My Sister My Love/ Syskonbädd 1782" and "I am Curious Yellow", etc). "Night Games" includes a bold flashback scene of Jan as a child (sensitive Jörgen Lindström, who played the young boy in Bergman's "The Silence") caught masturbating.

Former Swedish star Mai Zetterling's third directorial effort is particularly interesting for atmosphere, decors and cast, but the film is heavily depressing and the rather obvious symbolisms have dated badly. Sphynx-like, marvelous Ingrid Thulin has a field day as the bitchy and sensuous mother; Keve Hjelm is engagingly honest in a role that requires bravado and emotional range. The film is influenced by Bergman's "angst" films but also has an expressionist touch to it, because of Rune Ericson's camera-work and experiments with different lenses.

If you like films with decadent-bourgeois flavor and angst-filled characters, this is for you. Of course, it's also a must for Ingrid Thulin fans, but it's probably a very difficult film to find these days. My vote: 6 out of 10.

Daring but disturbing

[gbill-74877 · 7/10 · 20 December 2022]

If you've ever returned to your family home as an adult after enduring a difficult childhood, you may identify with the memories that haunt a man as he makes his way through a now-abandoned mansion. Then again, it's not likely your childhood was messed up in the way his was, or at least, I hope it wasn't. The affections of this guy's wild, bohemian mother (Ingrid Thulin) ran hot and cold when he was a child. She pushed him away at times and would go off traveling without him, but also didn't have a clue about proper boundaries relative to his emerging sexual curiosity.

This brings us to the part of the film that caused such an uproar. It was viewed only in a private screening at the Venice Film Festival, and so offended Shirley Temple (then 38) that she resigned from the following San Francisco Film Festival. The scene is indeed cringe-worthy; after a bath, the mother tosses her naked 12-year-old boy (played by a 15-year-old actor) onto a bed, and begins tickling him. His whole body is visible, and we see him starting to get aroused. She takes a look and compliments him on his manhood and asks him if he knows what it's for. Then, while she reads the Song of Solomon to him, he begins masturbating under the blanket, and she's outraged, humiliating him as she yells at him. He is highly conflicted, feeling desperate for his mother's attention amidst all her socializing, and also wanting her sexually, things that carry over into adulthood. He can't make love to his fiancée without having the image of his mother float up into his head. So yes, ugh, it's a lot. There is honesty here and it took courage from director Mai Zetterling, but the explicitness of the scene on the bed probably wasn't necessary.

Meanwhile, after his mother dies, the boy is subject to the naked greed of her friends and relations, and watches his beloved aunt get hauled off to the insane asylum for trying to stand up for him. A lot of these memories have a surreal, carnival type of feeling to them, which I took to be how childhood memories are skewed and sometimes exaggerated in our minds. They're impressions. At times his visions of the people from the past and how he feels, like being stuck in a birdcage, seem forced, and at other times, they lag a bit. On the other hand, the film is beautifully shot, with wonderful framing and the use of reflections. It seems far too simplistic for him to "blow up" his past at the end (I mean gee, if only it were this easy), but there was something cathartic about it. Overall, it's not one I can say I love, but I admire the filmmaking, how daring it was, and how it tackled the topic of childhood trauma, even if it was inelegant at times.

arty

[nickrogers1969 · 4/10 · 12 November 2009]

There is a reason why this film is unknown and forgotten. "Nattlek" is quite bad. It is not as good as Mai Zetterling's "Älskande Par" or "the Girls" (which I consider as the best Swedish film ever made).

I was looking forward to seeing this film. It was released on DVD in Sweden, so I jumped at the chance to watch it. It sounded good, or at least interesting. Ingrid Thulin, who was always a good actress, was typecast here as a neurotic mother to a little boy, (reminds me of the decadence in "the Damned" by Visconti). When the boy is an adult he takes with him his girlfriend to the castle where he grew up and they face his childhood demons.

The girlfriend played by fresh faced Lena Brundin gives the film some humanity but she has to play opposite Keve Hjelm who is very dull and plays his role in the pretentious acting style people back then thought was serious and worthy. Famous Swedish jazz singer Monica Zetterlund livens things up but has a too brief part in this film.

Crazy party guests and relatives try to give the film a feeling of Fellini and Bergman without any feeling or depth. Borrowing fashionable ingredients from other films does not an art-house classic make. The film is interesting to watch as a document of its time. The arty psychodrama films went out of style. This type of film killed itself.

a very good movie

[dje-4 · 10/10 · 27 August 2002]

Jan (Keve Hjelm) grooved up in an over class environment and with a strong attachment to his egocentric and cold-hearted mother Irene (Ingrid Thulin). After many years, he returns to his childhood environment, an old mansion that have stood empty for a long time, but the memories live on.

One definition of Eurotrash

[ofumalow · 4/10 · 21 March 2024]

Pauline Kael called this movie a combination of "the worst of Fellini and the worst of Bergman," and glib as that sounds, she's right--it exactly locates the leading pretensions of the era's art cinema flavors, and combines them in a particularly superficial and flashy way that lacks either great director's depth, originality or humor. The rather confused structure interweaves past and present as the grown heir to a country estate brings his fiancee there, where he recalls his difficult childhood being alternately amused, abused and ignored by self-absorbed parents. The latter use their wealth and privilege to be kingpins of a cartoonishly decadent social scene. But the film isn't satire--we're meant to take its grotesques very seriously as some statement about, you know, Society, though they only resemble figures from other movies. At the end we're apparently to understand that the present-day characters have somehow been liberated from the chains of the past, but that catharsis rings hollow, particularly since those characters are just as one-dimensional as the wealthy sinners in the flashbacks.

Zetterling's other directorial movies are said to be good, so maybe this was just her auteurist folly, all too obviously derivative of other auteurs' follies. But the imitative quality robs of it any genuine emotion, or even pleasure in flamboyance, though it's well-shot and edited. There's some nudity, a scene about (though not graphically depicting) masturbation, and other content that must have seemed terribly shocking in 1966. (Indeed, the film's most lasting notoriety came from Shirley Temple Black having quit a festival jury in a highly publicized huff over the inclusion of this "pornography." Little did she know how much more pornographic movies would get, or how soon.) But the problem here is that there's nary a single moment that feels organic--everything is trying so HARD to be "shocking." Which pretty much kills any shock value, at least for me.

Anyway, it's a garish, self-important but empty-headed effort that was never a good movie, but now serves as a vivid time capsule of just how merrily (and self-consciously) taboos were being freshly broken at the time of its making. Somehow the overstaged quasi-orgies and such aren't much fun, even without the equally bogus "But think about the child!!" hand-wringing accompanying them. But if you wanna see a personification of what was then called (among other things) "the New Permissiveness," this is it, in a nutshell. Of COURSE Shirley Temple was appalled. You can practically sense the filmmakers congratulating themselves that she would be.

Jörgen Lindström

[yusufpiskin · 9/10 · 17 February 2024]

The film, which premiered at the 27th Venice International Film Festival, caused so much controversy at the time that the Venice jury had to watch the film in a special room.

The name of the film at the center of all these discussions is Jörgen Lindström, who started his cinema career at the age of 9 and starred in 4 films that went down in golden letters in the history of cinema, three of which were directed by Ingmar Bergman. He left the cinema at the age of 12 and started editing films after university.

I mean, it's very difficult to shoot this movie today.

Swedish cinema consists of cinema workers who love to walk successfully on a tight rope...

Pretentious rubbish, impressively filmed.

[rob-townsend-3 · 3/10 · 17 October 2022]

Night Games is 2h02 long. Please don't waste these precious hours of your life on this movie!

The black and white photography and the framing and editing of the film are impressive. Thereafter, it's all downhill, I regret.

A deranged mother alternately pushing her son away and keeping him close ( a bit too close for audience comfort). OK, they mess you up your mum (and dad) ...., but this takes far too long to make the point.

One found it difficult to care about the damaged goods of a son, and what were all these orgy-grotesque Fellini film types doing padding the running type out? A film, additionally, about western decadence probably? But, Oh, dear!

I admired Mai Zetterling as an actress in the 50s and 60s, and, more generally, in her wish to transcend stereotyped views of beautiful Swedish (and other national) actresses - from behind the camera.

Night Games is, however, a pretentious failure.

Not much of anything

[bob998 · 3/10 · 29 December 2022]

I gave it 3 because the cinematography is really rather good, and Naima Wifstrand, a stalwart of Swedish cinema for decades, is in the cast. Otherwise it's trash, and would have been included in Pauline Kael's wonderful essay The Come-Dressed-As -The-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties if it had been made a few years earlier. This is the kind of movie that is made to shock the bourgeoisie, and I am not the least surprised that Shirley Temple was horrified by it. It fails however on the most fundamental level--that of revealing something important about the hero's psyche. Instead we are given party scenes that go on forever, with grotesque characters you'd never meet outside of a mental hospital.

Criterion channel brought back three of Mai Zetterling's films from the 60's, and on the evidence of Night Games they shouldn't have bothered.

Provocative subject matter is pretentiously (and boringly) handled

[gridoon2024 · 3/10 · 27 October 2023]

Mai Zetterling's feature-length directing debut, "Loving Couples" (1964), was a fairly conventional, but also fairly successful on those terms, Ingmar Bergman imitation. For her next film, "Night Games" (1966), Zetterling moves away from Bergman (while still using some of his regular actors) to go on her own path - and seems to have lost her marbles. The film has a provocative subject matter (a boy who grows into middle age without ever really getting over his erotic mother fixation), which is, however, pretentiously and - most importantly - boringly handled. The film is alienating and off-putting right from the start, with zero narrative drive. The ending seems hardly worth the wait. * out of 4.