A Swedish summer raises a problem that recurs here, that of translating the titles of foreign films. A Swedish summer is indeed the translation chosen for Flickan which means "little girl" in Swedish ... Sure, the movie takes place during the summer in Sweden but the choice of Flickan is not trivial, as is never a choice title (well usually). If Edfeldt chose for his first title of the film Flickan , it is because his entire plot revolves around a young girl with red hair and sad eyes. This is not the chronicle of a Swedish summer but the initiation story of a little Swedish, which takes place during the summer. This is not the same ...
So I shut the heavy aside (and somewhat poorly written ballot) to return to this delicate and fragile little thing. Flickan is a bit like one of those trinkets of no interest to big people but takes on a sentimental or initiation for children. This little girl dreams of Africa. Her parents leave soon and is confident of being the trip. Just days before departure, they teach him that it does not come and she will spend the summer with her aunt, she does not know really. This aunt is inconsistent and the girl will not hurt him away from home, sending him boating with a rich guy she wants. The girl left alone in her big house, left to itself ...
Flickan fate a bit off the beaten track and hackneyed initiation in children confronting sometimes very cruelly the girl in the real world around him. Edfeldt part of his character in extreme close-ups, as if enclosed in this disorder and veiled innocence. The beginning of the film leaves it little room for space and other characters. Then plans are gradually, tentatively, from which flows the other in this micro-universe.
For worse and for better. The film depicts the severity and darkness irresponsibility of adults (parents of the girl go to help children in Africa but left their daughter in the hands of an aunt ...), immature frivolity of teenage concerns. He contrasts complex world, naturalist and alone with his young daughter than her two friends, two ninnies who invents a manipulative celebrity cardboard making playback on the songs of Abba.
Only this solitude is troubled on every side by the arrival of a charming little blond girl becomes infatuated with. The first stirrings, very modest, very clumsy are transcribed with infinite accuracy, which is sometimes uncomfortable (like when the girl sits on a mirror with his legs apart to draw sex on a sheet of paper). We are touched, disturbed, alarmed by the collapse of the youth. We think of the wonderful Swedish Love Story Roy Anderson ( In Karlekshistoria , 1969), monuments of forgotten film about adolescence.
Finally Flickan avoids the trap of nostalgia. Cradled in a very refined picture setting (the work of the director of photography Morse) the film offers, distilled beauty and unease with an elegiac realism and clear. Even if it is in the 70s, the plot touches on the "universal" through a very personal approach, however, report the child's gender, to love, liberty and the other.
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