FILM / Whispering Swede nothings

AT FIRST, it seems like a joke or a typing error, but there it is in the opening titles of House of Angels (15): En Film av Colin Nutley. While most aspiring British directors still have no international ambitions beyond moving to Hollywood, Colin Nutley has found a rather different niche for himself. This is his third feature film, made in Swedish from his own script, and has broken box-office records in Sweden.

Part of the pleasure of House of Angels is its playful avoidance of Scandinavian cliche. The ladies of the parish may do needlework, but the local lawyer dances the tango with his wife in their summer house. The heroine, a city girl inheriting a farmhouse from the grandfather she didn't know she had, may be called Fanny, but the echoes of Bergman are few and far between. A pastor and a parishioner, for instance, talking in church, might be expected to be discussing the implacable silence of God, at the very least, but here the subject is bungee-jumping. The pastor remarks drily that he bungee-jumps every Sunday; he is presumably referring to his sermons, where he leaps into the void with only the elastic rope of the text to save him from harm.

The contrast between country and city ways, and the conflict between the generations are serviceable enough themes, but in House of Angels (the title refers to the name of the inherited farmhouse) the differences are consistently less striking than the affinities. Fanny (Helena Bergstrom) may arrive on the pillion of a motorbike for her grandfather's funeral, changing in the churchyard from her leathers into a marginally more suitable outfit, but from the moment she arrives at Angel's Farm she fits right in. Her colour scheme - blues eyes, pale hair - somehow complements the yellow boards and white trim.

The country people are not used to strangers, and not used, either, to explaining arrangements which to them are perfectly obvious. The result is a series of small narrative shocks or, more often, unanswered questions. A boss and his employee turn out to be father and son. The man and woman who run the local supermarket seem like an authentic bad marriage, he watching porn videos in the back of the shop, she bicycling indefatigably to assignations, until the moment she tells him to grow up and get married. Are they perhaps brother and sister after all, and her supposed discreet entanglements not adulteries but simply doomed attempts to prevent the whole town from knowing her business? Certainly Gottfried and Ivar, the two elderly brothers who live together, also give a marital impression, but an impression this time of largely silent communion.

Fanny's arrangements, too, are mildly deceptive. She arrives on the back of a big motorbike driven by a stubble-faced outlaw, but a second glance shows that Zac (Rikard Wolff) is wearing more eye make-up than is altogether common among bikers. The scandal is not that they sleep together but that they don't or, rather, that when they sleep together it is for comfort, in a strange house probably infested with rats, and more for his comfort than hers.

Fanny flirts with every man she meets, while Zac shows no obvious interest in anyone. Then when young Marten (Jacob Eklund), dazzled by Fanny and disobeying his father's strict instructions, comes to do some repairs, he seems about to make his move. He entices Marten towards his bedroom, where he says the windows are worst, and rests a hand, oh so casually, on Marten's shoulder.

The scene in the bedroom, however, is something that Nutley chooses not to show. There are two likely outcomes of the scene, both of them with major repercussions for the rest of the story - either that Zac's overtures are repulsed, or that he gets his wicked way. But no one refers to what happened in any terms. Perhaps we're supposed to deduce that Zac didn't attempt seduction after all, and though House of Angels is, at 126 minutes, already over extended for so gentle a comedy, some indication of what went on would have been a good investment, since it would keep our minds from wandering. Otherwise, it looks as if Nutley, having set up his little confrontation, retreats from it; that all his plot strands are not so much conflicts to be explored as reconciliations waiting to happen.

Nutley's leisurely approach is most successful in a scene between Fanny and Zac and the strange brothers Gottfried and Ivar, paying their first visit to Angel's Farm for three decades (it is characteristic of the film that the details of the feud are not gone in to, though it may also be characteristic of rural life that there is always more back-story than story, more ancient history than anyone can quite keep up with). As Zac and Fanny gradually describe the cabaret act with which they earn their living, which involves drag on his part and on her part a costume largely composed of bananas, the two brothers react in opposite ways, Gottfried (Ernst Gunther) registering incredulous child-like pleasure, Ivar (Tord Petterson) showing a wincing spiritual shock.

House of Angels is well-cast throughout, with the senior actors in particular amounting to a roll-call of Swedish talent, veterans of films by Tarkovsky, Widerberg, Zetterling. These actors do their roles honour with the richness of their performances. When the richest local inhabitant (Sven Wollter) pays off a lawyer there is a lifetime of buying and selling conjured up by the convulsive gesture he makes with the rubber-band that secures his wallet.

There are technical subtleties, too, particularly on the soundtrack. When Gottfried and Ivar are preparing for that groundbreaking visit to the house, Gottfried picks out a hymn on the harmonium and sings along, painfully off-key. Then when the brothers set out for the house in their incongruous best, we hear a choir and an organ take up the hymn, with the line ' . . . and all things are reborn.' The hymn recurs later in the film, where it is revealed to have been the favourite of Fanny's mother, and called 'In the Lovely Summer-Time'.

If there is a criticism of House of Angels, it must be that Colin Nutley has somehow exported a British notion of the lovely summer-time (where it is enough that the sun puts in an appearance now and then) to the Sweden where he sets his story. What is missing is the sense of high summer that runs through Swedish culture, from Miss Julie to Smiles of a Summer Night, the sense of a season that is eery as well as fulfilling, a time when illusions as well as truths come into a hectic bloom.

For details see opposite.