Mac Ahlberg (Bert Torn) with Marie Forsa

Justine and Juliette (Mac Ahlberg as Bert Torn, 1975) with Marie Forsa and Anne Bie Wargurg is more explicit than the films of exploitation and sexploitation. My copy is in Swedish and, whereas my first copy of Exposed (Exponerad, 1971) was entirely in Swedish, the earlier film contains only nudity without depicting the sexual act. The swith from Something Weird video to dvd has made some films unavailable to me.
The films screenplay was written by its director. There is the use of an expository retrospective voice over during exterior shots of Marie Forsa during exterior shots; the character being an omnicient she already knows the plotline's denoument. The technique could have been used more fully , near beautifully,had the film been more of a serious drama. The plot turns when Juliette brings Justine to a party, which becomes a quiet orgy. She is then introduced an older man, who brings her home with him and she is brought from liscentiousness to romance. The motif is underdeveloped by the film's levity- that Justine is decieved into a love affair is left as a plot gimmick rather than as a moral theme, but in that way the decadence is supported by its its own hedonist theme rather than a plot theme like The Rise and Fall of Susan Lennox where love is the morality.
The bedroom is darkened as he unfastens her bra and the director uses closeshots and superimposures to depict their making love. The voice over connects adjacent scenes, but the motif of sex in the darkness and erotic moviegoing in the darkness is subtle when connected with later scenes. Only through the tenderness of his lovemaking can the bedroom and movie theater (screening room) be connected thematiclly He photographs her nude of the beach and then, as spectator, screens the film in a projection room. During a dinner party, she undresses while, dancing, being shown nude in profile and over the shoulder. She uses voice over to explain that the two are in love and yet he is more intellectually concerned with dabating free love and morality-the open marriage. He then brings her to the projection room to screen one of his films, the camera cutting back and forth between a close shot of her as vouyer and explicit sex scenes on the screen- the direction is reversed one hundred and eighty degress, from screen to spectator. He underesses her from behind in the darkened room and makes love to her slowly from that position. The use of the vouyer is supradiegetic rather than infradiegetic and positions the subject as spectator.
There is an amazing slightly low angled close shot of her lifting her dress in a subsequent scene. her lover returns her to the orgy from the beginning of the film, where she appears with Juliette- she is now a woman.
Mac Ahlberg had photographed the Swedish film Cats (Kattorna, Henning Carlsen) in 1965.
Marie Forsa appeared in the Joseph Sarno films Veil of Blood, Girl Meets Girl (1974) and Butterflies.

Inga silent film