Anita, Swedish Nymphet (1975)

Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

The Worst Film Ever

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Christina Lindberg was already selling herself in nude pinups and movies several years before this movie. This movie is yet just another "social issue" excuse for selling Christina Lindberg and soft-core porn.The movie pretends to explore the true life of a teenage sex-addict but in reality it's just an excuse for the nude and sexual content matter of the movie. There are of course the pompous analyses by her psychologist but they're simply a vehicle to deepen the chaotic and kinky erotic state of the character, played by Christina Lindberg.Overall, the movie lacks depth, the acting is poor and 70's-cliche' in its settings and seems to have no real purpose other than to sensationalize popular Christina Lindberg in yet one more sexually exploitative movie.

Anita is a nubile sixteen year old girl living in a bleak industrial town somewhere in the wilds of Sweden. She has a problem, in that her reputation in the town is at a low due to the fact that she insists on propositioning every man she meets - young or old, mostly ugly - and then giving them a blow job and sometimes more. The local girls call her a "slut", the local lads rough her up and her parents dismiss her in favour of her swat of a younger sister. Eventually Anita runs away to Stockholm (nobody misses her) and is lucky enough to hook up with a cute and well-mannered young man who not only falls in love with her but also understands that she's a textbook example of a nymphomaniac (him having access to the textbooks as he is a psychology student). The young man falls in love with Anita and eventually they get together, once Anita has been cured of her nymphomania by having an orgasm with a lesbian lover. Hold on, the plot goes a bit mad at the end there, doesn't it? Anita the film is as schizoid as its protagonist. It comes on like a particularly bleak version social realist cinema, all grimy interiors and ruined or soulless exteriors and does go some way to suggesting that Anita's sexual compulsiveness is an outcome of a particularly loveless family life (a la Ken Loach's film of the same name) in the context of a meaningless consumer society of shopping malls and urban development. Yet at the same time, the film voyeuristically finds excuse after excuse for getting the gorgeous actress (Christina Lindberg) who plays Anita naked at every opportunity. It is as if the film is itself suffering from the same compulsion as its heroine, and what's more it expects its audience to be suffering from the same malady.In the final third, the film loses all pretence to realism, with the completely gratuitous soft-core lesbian footage and an equally unnecessary trip to a strip joint, where Anita supports a saucy dancer in her routine. Logic is thrown completely out of the window, as Anita's completely unbelievable "cure" leads to her settling down to a life of doe-eyed monogamous bliss with her psychiatric student now boyfriend, ending in a church where the organ player notices them canoodling and so strikes up one of those jaunty & jolly tunes that we expect to find at the close of one of the late 60s Carry On films.Anita - Swedish Nymphet (as it is currently know in its UK DVD release) is certainly not a film which has anything much constructive to say on the subject of sexual compulsion (although its portrait of the malady in the first hour is convincing enough); instead, it's rather more intriguing as a symptom of the sexual compulsion of the society which made it and watched it: like the men accosted by Anita, the makers and viewers of the film may be made uncomfortable by her excesses but they aren't saying "no" to taking part in them themselves, compulsively.

You know how most 'erotic films' are burdened with long, boring, overly graphic sex scenes? This isn't one of them. Oh, there are some sex scenes, but most of the long, boring passages in this Scandinavian drama involve serious discussions about nymphomania or lots and lots of classical music. Anita is actually quite well-acted (Christina Lindberg is genuinely good) and reasonably serious, but still can't help itself when it comes to the requisite lesbian encounter, which comes out of left field and isn't terribly convincing. And watch out for the continuity error when Anita doffs her clothing for another soulless sexual liaison and magically pulls her hair back into a ponytail whilst her hands are, er, otherwise occupied. Not bad, not particularly good, and not very sexy, Anita will leave your Swedish meatballs lukewarm at best.

As you can notice, this film is both Swedish and french in production; there are two versions of this film that differ considerably; the french version has a logical plot evolution and is more sleazy than the Swedish version. The latter if more moral in tone and has an unlogical plot evolution; it also has less sex(y) scenes. In the Swedish version, the plot line of the young students forming a classical music group is more elaborated (and dull). The french version focuses more on the nymphmaniac addiction; in this version Christina Lindberg tries out a therapy to bring her relief of her addiction. The french version runs for 74 minutes; this makes the plot evolution more compact. The 'solution' of both versions is the same. For the french version I would give an 8 out of 10; for the Swedish version I would give a 6 out of 10