I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967)

X.  This was a movie banned in the United States.  Now, for those people who want to fight whether or not this movie actually deserves this rating, I'm not the guy who rated this.  Are there more vulgar movies?  Absolutely.  Is it pretty graphic?  Yes.  There's a lot of sex and nudity in the movie.  Is the movie all about that?  Not really.  There are long stretches of the movie where it's borderline a political documentary.  It should be noted that there is also a rape scene.

DIRECTOR: Vilgot Sjoman

I didn't think I'd have to rewatch this movie.  I'm also now aware that I'll probably have to rewatch Salo, In the Realm of the Senses, and The Passion of the Christ.  (What?  I don't love brutal torture.)  Out of all of those movies, the easiest movie to watch is I Am Curious.  While it absolutely borders on vulgarity (although, is it really?), there have been umpteen films that wouldn't have batted an eye in American cinemas.  I suppose it's hard to say that I Am Curious isn't that revolutionary when it was the court case that helped decided vulgarity and censorship laws in the United States.

I'm a different person than the last time that I watched this movie.  It's always so weird to watch the same movies through different eyes.  I'm going to go introspective and try to be a little flowery with my language, so I apologize already to the few people who are reading this --most likely --buried blog entry on my page (despite the fact that my readership is falling through the floor!).  I have always loved movies.  But after college, I tried to see everything.  If you know me even a little bit, all of this probably scans with you.  I'm still very wired to be that guy, the guy who sees everything.  This blog is almost a perverted evolution of that same attitude.  But with trying to see everything, I was learning.  I'm not scolding myself for trying to watch I Am Curious before I was ready.  After all, that's how we learn.  I'm having a hard time reading Don Quixote as well right now.  I'm doing all of this supplemental reading to help me through it, but I'm watching it from a place of trying to be informed.  But I'm going to call something out for what it is (Note:  I was informed that "Calling a spade a spade" might be racist terminology, so I'm shifting out of that).  When I was working the video store, people rented I Am Curious because they tended to lean into more pervy movies.

I honestly don't think that I Am Curious is as pervy as I perceived it back in the day.  It sounds like I'm desensitized towards stuff.  I don't know if that's true.  If anything, as a guy with a wife and five kids, I'm probably more sensitive to sexuality in film.  But I don't think that I Am Curious (Yellow) is as pervy as I remember it to be.  Does it have incredibly graphic content in it?  Yeah.  But the way that I kind of view the movie is about comfort with one's body over something that is only vulgar.  In a rare case of sex in cinema, much of I Am Curious (Yellow) isn't about exploiting its female lead.  If anything, Lena and Borje just feel comfortable around each other, like two people in a relationship might be.  Now, I'm not saying the story of Lena and Borje should be applauded.  Both Lena and Borje are incredibly immature when it comes to healthy.  Nothing like another movie from Svensk Filmindustri to present adultery and promiscuous sex as something that is normalized, but I'm still reeling from the Bergman box, so please bear with me.

But now that I'm far more political than I was after college, I kind of like what I Am Curious (Yellow) does for the narrative of activism.  Like with many of my blogs, my writing often acts as a vessel for unpacking difficult ideas. Yellow (Note: I'm going to be watching Blue fairly soon, but I'll probably write about Blue as a companion piece and as a sympathetic movie than as a standalone movie) has a lot of feelings about Lena as a protagonist and they don't always gel.  The beginning of the film presents Lena almost as an intellectual guerrilla journalist.  She is headstrong and wants to change the world with her camera.  Now, with the meta element that Slojman incorporates into his movie (a filmmaker making a movie that we're currently watching), I get that this is the Lena closer to the reality that the actress Lena really is.  (God, I hate that sentence, but it's late and I'm frustrated.  The real world Lena is inspirational.  While that scene goes on way too long (reminding me of the movies that my friends and I made in college.  Scenes would go on way too long because we had what we considered "good footage"), it shows that Lena has an ethical core coupled with a good head on her shoulders.  

But that Lena isn't the Lena of the entire movie.  As the movie progresses, it distances itself from the Slojman and Lena taking on the world narrative, going as far to really interview Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Instead, the movie branches out further and further into Lena's sexuality.  Now, there are moments where Lena seems incredibly grounded.  But as the movie progresses, she shifts further into almost a parody of herself.  There's this sequence that is played for laughs where Lena goes to a retreat to improve herself.  She's topless the entire time and we're supposed to giggle at the absurdity of her mortification. These scenes don't align with the Lena that we're introduced at the beginning of the movie.  Now, I have two different reads on this and both of them are probably wrong.  Slojman infamously didn't have a script while making this movie.  He says so in the introduction to the film.  As such, the beginning of the film is the discovery of what the story is going to be. It seems like the fictional version of Slojman wants to introduce us to the Lena he knows and the Lena he wants to work with.  He instantly imbues his fictional counterpart with jealousy, knowing that Lena will be doing these graphic sex scenes with another actor later in the film.  But as the movie progresses out of the planning stages that the beginning of the film presents, the movie gets more movie-y.  By the end, "real" Lena and character Lena have merged.

The alternative is that it is commenting on the absurdity of the movement as a whole.  Lena's personality is almost defined by her counter-culture rhetoric.  She files information about old boyfriends in boxes and surrounds herself with the commandments for being a revolutionary.  While the beginning of the movie shows her to be wise and committed to a cause, the more that we get to know her, the more silly she comes across.  By the end of the movie, we almost just see her as a tragic, sex-crazed hippie who seems pretty vapid in Slojman's eyes.  I'm talking about the meta scene in the car where she gets annoyed by having to wear her sunglasses  in the scene.  If the silliness and absurdity of the movie tonally shifts away from the seriousness of the first third of the film, it could be that it making us question the reality of what we see when it comes to revolutionaries.  I don't necessarily love this read of the movie.  After all, I Am Curious (Yellow) is counter-culture and revolutionary in itself.  Why would it throw all of these protesters out on their rear ends if it is trying to encourage free thinkers.  

It's weird to write about I Am Curious (Yellow) without having seen blue recently.  I was actually in a little bit of a pickle when it came to approaching this.  I'll tell you right now.  If I watched Blue immediately after watching Yellow and waited to write about Yellow then, I wouldn't be able to separate them.  I remember being so baffled by the symbiotic nature of the two movies to the point where they bled together.  But as a standalone movie, I'm still left with questions.  This movie is almost the perfect amount of avant-garde for me.  It's still incredibly frustrating, but that's something that I kind of just live with.  

It's not like I'm closing this blog up.  Treat this as a To Be Continued...