The Criterion Channel, the gift that never stops giving. Seriously, if it ever went out of business - or was intellectually gutted after some corporate buyout - I'd have to pull a Mr. Zipski and run amuck with a meat cleaver. This month they're featuring four films in a collection entitled Nordic Noir. I don't know if the films are truly film noir, at least in the classic definition (often Criterion will tack the Noir designation on collections because, well, we all love film noir), but they definitely seem to fit in the sense of dark films based around deeply flawed characters with troubling, vague endings. The first one we watched was Hasse Ekman's Girl with Hyacinths, which I absolutely loved. Apparently Ingmar Bergman loved it as well. It's the story of the suicide of Dagmar Brink, beautifully played by Eva Henning (who was also in Elvira Madigan, which I saw a couple years ago - and now definitely need to watch again). The story is driven, in class film noir flashback style, by her two neighbors, Anders Wikner (Ulf Palme) and his wife Britt (Birgit Tengroth), who try to figure out why she killed herself. They interview a number of people, including a tortured painter, Elias Korner (played subtly by Anders Ek). Not to give too much of the plot away, but it has become a classic of Queer cinema, and the ending raises more questions than answering them, and is just about perfect. Highly recommended. I'm looking forward to the rest of the Nordic Noir collection, sadly only three left. If I were not retiring I think I'd teach a class on global film noir, focusing on the subtle cultural differences which make these different national versions.
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