Watch Anita, Swedish Nymphet For Free

Memorable, crazy movie

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

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.

People debate today whether there really is such a thing as nymphomania, or if it was just a term pinned on women who tried to lead a naturally healthy sex life back in much more repressive, Victorian times when such a thing was not permissible. One thing's for sure though , if this particular movie is based on a real story as it claims to be, this girl definitely had a serious problem. The girl in this movie (played by Cristina Lindberg) , will sleep with anybody, and I do mean ANYBODY. This turns her into a social outcast (because of course, nobody likes a beautiful girl who wants to have sex all the time). She's like a junkie in her compulsion, begging for the key to a friend's apartment so she can have quickies with unattractive businessmen she picks up at the train station. And when one kindly elderly guy tries to console her after an unsatisfying sexual encounter, she drops to her knees to give him the b.j. of his life.All this is treated in a very serious, at times almost depressing manner, and Lindberg gives a very earnest performance. Since I doubt too many people then or now watched this movie out of concern for the social problem of nymphomania (more likely they wanted to know where they could find a girl like this), this move and Lindberg's performance may seem pretty campy. I have to say though I'd much rather see a movie like this that sets out to be somewhat serious and falls into camp than a movie that aims at camp and falls flat on its face. And though Lindberg will never be mentioned in the same breath as Greta Garbo, her overly seriously performance here is infinitely better than most modern-day "cult actresses" and "scream queens" camping and mugging their way through movies that they (very erroneously) consider beneath their talents.In any case, campy or not, this movie definitely succeeds as exploitation thanks to Lindberg doffing her duds every five minutes or so. If you've never seen Cristina Lindberg, she's kind of like really sexy mutant or mythical beast--she has the face of an innocent teenage Swedish schoolgirl attached to the body of a voluptuous burlesque-era stripper (which is not at all to say that her appeal is limited to those who dig schoolgirls or burlesque strippers). Her most memorable scene here is where she and her goody-good twin sister are singing for their parents' friends and she turns the occasion into an impromptu full-monty striptease. And if you are a fan of Lindberg, or become one after this movie, also check her out in "Thriller--a Cruel Picture" (a favorite of Quentin Tarantino), her first film "Maid in Sweden", the German "schulmadchen report" films in which she was a regular, and the unbelievably depraved film "Depraved" (sadly unavailable in English). She's almost always worth the price of admission all by herself.

The best thing about "Anita" is that is supposed to work within the sexploitation genre, and it is actually a subtle and insightful social critique -well, at least in the first sixty minutes. To someone who's looking for crude, hardcore sex scenes (myself included), this movie is may be disappointing, but for a feminist researcher the movie's angle points out and contextualizes patriarchy and domination as main causes of social "ilness." Just watch the perspective of the movie, and you'll see a "lylja-for-ever" for the seventies.In addition, the movie suggests an interesting development of the relationship between the psychology student/psychoanalyst/'doctor' and his patient Anita. At one point, you can see the parallel between the authoritarian/ disengaged father and the psychoanalyst, and both of them are exercising power over the nymphomaniac character. However, Hendrix becomes involved in the story (he hangs on the door where the full human contact-I mean the orgasm- takes place), and we get a sweaty non-convincing highly idealized ending.I would watch this movie again to see: 1. the construction of anita's character as an outcast 2. the whole symbolism behind the young student's actions: feeding her, putting the band aides on, offering her a community where she is actually defended 3. the dysfunctional family 4. the sad scenes of sex that reminds me how the porn industry is using my fantasies. but hey, I kinda like this, though...