I Am Curious (Blue) (1968)

Not rated, but the other one is rated X.  This may or not be accurate.  I mean, while there is quite a bit of sexual content (including nudity), it is somewhat less than I Am Curious (Yellow).  I still felt super awkward watching this one again.   The movie also has a lot of discussions about sexually transmitted diseases, so keep that in mind when watching the movie.  There's also the implication of rape in a scene.  The movie also, in its attempt to remind audiences of its political core, says quite a bit negative about the church.

DIRECTOR: Vilgot Sjoman

Do you know how tempted I was just to copy and paste my blog from I Am Curious (Yellow) and just switch Yellow to Blue?  I mean, that would have been wholly unfair to the movie and also too lazy for me to handle.  But there was a mischievous element in me that wanted to do just that.  And, honestly?  If I'm being the most honest?  This writing right here is the most intense demonstration of willpower ever because I have this blog and then I have to follow it up with Through a Glass Darkly, another film produced by Svensk Filmindustri.

This is going to be so hard to write about.  Part of it comes from the fact that this is meant to be a companion piece to a movie as opposed to a sequel or anything.  From what I understand based on the introduction from Sjoman on the I Am Curious (Yellow) disc was that he must have felt like the film was not quite what he wanted by itself.  Because both movies were made without a formalized script, there was something experimental about the whole thing.  I mean, watch this movie for even a few minutes and you get what Sjoman was shooting for in terms of being experimental.  We live in an era where formalized scripts tend to be optional.  If anything, a lot of the prestige television and cinema we make comes from loose drafts and improvisation.  So I get it.  But the relationship between Blue and Yellow seems oddly tenuous.  

The movies tout themselves to be the same movie, but different.  I might actually have a hard time accepting this as fact.  Maybe, in my mind, I am thinking that the same movie but different means the same story with different tones.  Instead, we get something that almost acts as a sequel.  These movies come out a year apart from each other.  They feature the same characters played by the same actors.  They have a lot of the same motifs.  But the story is different in each movie.  It's almost like the other movie doesn't exist, but the same characters exist.  Do you know what issue I'm having with this?  Back in 1967-1968, the notion of a reboot doesn't really exist.  What I Am Curious (Blue) is --as dumb as I sound writing this --is a reboot.  It's a reboot of Yellow.  Yellow didn't give Sjoman the satisfaction of a movie by itself, so he made another movie where the canon of the first movie is almost arbitrary.  The things that he wanted to keep about the film stayed the same.  What he didn't want to stick didn't stick.  That's fine.

I know.  I hate me too for saying it.  I'm already debating myself.  I, too, am being split into Blue and Yellow.  I get that there's more nuance to what I just said. But part of what Blue and Yellow are all about is coming to grips with some complicated thoughts.  At the films core, there is a shared intentional DNA.  Lena is a political activist who is open to sexual experiences.  In both worlds, she's frustrated by the world around her both politically and personally.  But with Blue it seems like the focus is on the movie itself.  Both films have a metatextual core to them.  Sjoman as a character making a movie about making a movie is happening in both stories.  Every time that we get invested in the grounded story, Sjoman appears to remind us that this is a movie.  It's very Bertolt Brecht.  

But I had an easier time grasping onto Blue than Yellow.  That kind of surprises me.  I mean, both stories are almost amorphous in their storytelling. There isn't a clear plot going on in either film.  But with Blue, it seems like Sjoman almost embraces the meta narrative for the benefit of the grounded world.  The Lena in Yellow seems to be finding her own spirituality.  There's something laughable about how Lena fails to embrace her own activism, always searching for the next high.  Blue, however, offers a Lena who seems human, despite the very weird metanarrative about making a movie.  She still lacks the maturity that Yellow's Lena has, but her maturity seems a lot more universal. She has a complicated relationship with her mother.  She's annoyed by annoying people who are important to her overall success in life.  It makes sense that Blue's Lena has a meandering lifestyle.  

There's also lovely motifs of disappointment.  The whole thing feels very upset at the lack of caring that people have.  I can't help but confess that I might be bringing a lot of my own neuroses to this movie because I have been so depressed about the way that politics has played out.  Part of what makes Lena upset (as a background concept) is the notion that prisons used to be something.  I have to confess that I only know about the Swedish penal system from memes.  I know that there was probably a complex political battle to get prison systems up to snuff and I am spared the burden of understanding the complex turmoil that got it to that spot.  But Lena seems to be the only person in this entire movie who is angry at the stagnation that the penal system has taken.  Now, because I don't know the intricacies of Swedish politics, for all I know that she thinks that more could be done with the prisons or that the prisons might be inhuman places of torture.  I don't know what exactly she is advocating for because I don't really have a baseline for her position.  All I know is that her actions seem to lack any real punch because the world seems happy with the misery that Lena has pointed out.

What does I Am Curious offer as a unified product?  From a certain perspective, I get the feeling that a lot of it is dealing with Sjoman's frustrations with a movie that he made.  While Yellow and Blue are solid in themselves, they don't feel like this transcendent work without the companion piece.  But if I didn't think of it in terms of artistic expression, I can't say that the two movies offer much to one another outside of seeing a bizarre experiment come to life.  Yes, Yellow needs Blue and Blue needs Yellow, but it's almost because of a novelty element.  Neither film is fully dependent on the other outside of the notion that these are two alternate movies to one another featuring some of the same talent and concepts as the other.  I wish I could say that these movies changed my life.  I appreciate how political they are.  I like some of the weirder stuff.  But that's not something that always gels in the movie.  It's good, but something is still missing.  

But thank goodness that he didn't create I Am Curious (Green), mainly because there is no green on the Swedish flag.