Sweden: Heaven and Hell (1968)

The important thing to remember about Sweden: Heaven and Hell, Luigi Scattini's 1968 mondo movie, is that it is an extraordinarily reactionary film.  An exercise in sheer hypocrisy, as are many films of this era claiming 'expose' various aspects of the 'new' permissive society.  They combine a scalding, sceptical and dismissive tone in their commentary, while the images which accompany it happily focus on lots of bared breasts and bums jiggling around for the sole benefit of the very audience the commentary is telling should be disgusted by all this free sex and nudity.  It's a trick still beloved of British tabloids, which like nothing better than to publish articles telling readers just how depraved, say, modern television is, whilst accompanying the article with plenty of stills from the object of their disgust, invariably showing naked women, lesbian sex and the like.  Presumably the readers are meant to feel ashamed if even mildly aroused by what they have had shoved in front of them, (so ashamed and disgusted that they will doubtless flock to see the TV shows or films being condemned, just to check for themselves that they really are that depraved and disgusting).  To get back to Sweden: Heaven and Hell, the film purports to be a documentary about the 'socialist paradise' that was late sixties Sweden, where liberal philosophies supposedly infused every aspect of life, from sexual mores to crime, from housing to education.  But the film's narration, (provided by Edmund Purdom in the English version, using the usual supercilious tone he employed for such jobs), makes clear from the outset that it isn't here to praise modern Sweden, but rather to bury it and everything it stands for.

It's central thesis, (if we can apply such a grand term to a mondo movie), appears to be that despite the freedoms and prosperity of Swedish society, it is, in fact, dysfunctional and its citizens deeply unhappy with their lot.  To prove this thesis, the film's makers, naturally, have to show us copious amounts of nudity and simulated and/or implied sex, mainly between young people, with their elders often looking on disapprovingly.  Which ignores the fact that, far from being a recent phenomena, even in 1968 Swedish society already had long-established liberal attitudes toward sex and relationships.  But why let the facts get in the way of a bit of sensationalism?  This is a mondo movie, after all.  But all this sex, it seems, encourages a higher incidence of rape, (you'd think the opposite would be true, particularly as, historically, the Swedish population has had more women than men, another factor encouraging a more relaxed attitude toward sexual relationships), which, apparently, turns the victims into lesbians, which is why there are so many lesbians in Sweden.  The outrageous claims aren't confined to sexual liberation.  According to Sweden: Heaven and Hell, the country's obsession with youth has resulted in all of their old people being herded into high-rise housing where they all die lonely deaths, neglected by both families and society.  Which ignores the fact that throughout the post-war period, all across Europe, well-intentioned, but misguided, housing policies had focused upon eliminating slums and replacing them with modern tower blocks.  Which, indeed, did leave many people feeling isolated.  It wasn't a problem unique to Sweden, caused by its pursuit of its 'socialist' paradise based on sex and nudity. 

Other outrageous claims include the 'fact' that in Sweden car theft wasn't a crime and that an owner stopping a youth from stealing their vehicle could be arrested, as stopping the thief would infringe their liberty to enjoy themselves!  Not to forget the whole sequence on how child offenders were treated in Sweden - pretty humanely, to modern eyes, as they end up being placed in a community environment for their rehabilitation, with the idea that they can eventually be re-integrated into their families.  While the narration concedes that such methods might work and that they are probably better than locking the kids up in juvenile detention centres, it can't help but question why they were offending in the first place, suggesting that the reason young girls ended up prostituting themselves and so on was down to the failings of that permissive Swedish society, which had left them depressed and feeling disconnected.  But should we be surprised by a mondo movie taking such an approach?  Obviously not.  After all, the genre, from its instigation with Mondo Cane (1963), had, in large part, been about presenting 'primitive' rituals and behaviours (usually involving sex and nudity) to more 'sophisticated' audiences in the 'civilised' west as something to be laughed at, under cover of being a serious anthropological study.  With those 'primitive' societies pretty much mined out by schockumentaries by the late sixties, it was natural for the makers of  such films to for alternative subjects - the occult, sex and violence, swinging London, for instance - with the so-called 'permissive society' becoming a natural target.  bearing in mind that these movies originated in Italy - still a socially conservative country with the Catholic church exerting enormous influence over politics and public morals in the late sixties - places such as Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, must have seemed as exotic and outrageous as all those 'primitive' South Sea islanders who featured in the early mondo movies.  With Italian audiences being the primary market, it is all too obvious just why Sweden: Heaven and Hell presents its subject in the way in which it does - it allows them to glimpse that 'forbidden fruit' of permissiveness, (that, in reality, many Italians, especially younger Italians, were already enjoying themselves), while simultaneously 'tut-tutting' and condemning such filth.