Nothing is worth regretting,
Love, love, and all the same.
Dating, love and defeat
We are not allowed to move.
Joseph Brodsky
The boy. A naive lad, a whiskey-free kid who barely put his foot above the entrance to adulthood. Fifteen years of Stig resemble sheets written with useful information notebook. Every day new knowledge, discovery, shock. What is an orgy, how much gum can be chewed, how long a working thing in trousers is - the schoolboy involuntarily grows quickly, family need drives. He wants to wipe the nose of a worthless parent and become a support for his mother. During the war years, feelings are exacerbated especially - about as in a woman stuck on the threshold of fortieth. Beautiful, well-groomed, educated and libertine. The beckoning power of taboo pleasure, with which the teacher entangled a pretty student, is more effective than all the whispered tales of classmates. Their stories are somewhere far away, and the hot body of a young woman is nearby, stretch out your hand and unbutton. Sweet world of these adults, not life is a holiday. No one wants to feel like a bit of an apple, when the ripe taste is lost, and on parched lips only bitterness.
The turbulent and at the same time gentle romantic relationship between a green young man and an experienced lady forms the first ovaries of the film with a floral name, but the grown tree reaches for another sun. The narration of the last work of Bo Wiederberg brings it together with the later “Scandalous Diary”, but the more curious that both paintings are not about an affair between a schoolboy and a teacher. Formally, yes, but even before Stig’s defining acquaintance with Viola’s husband, doubts creep in as to who initiated the relationship. Quite quickly, the teacher's adultery grows into an uneasy union of three people who have come to their own impasse. The woman desperately seized the opportunity to feel welcome again, not realizing the doom of the relationship. A drunken husband found in the boy a kindred soul of a connoisseur of beauty, forgetting about a predator in a purple robe. Stig himself takes in someone else's house pleasant communication and something more than a hopeless life and concern for his brother-sailor, again, without taking into account who is the real owner there. This unusual love triangle in German-bombed Malmo is the farewell of a hopeless Swedish dreamer. He spent his life competing with the more famous countryman Bergman and finally broke out with an emotional masterpiece about suffering maturity.
“What is wisdom?” asks Wiederberg. Using the main role of the son of Yuhan, he for a while again feels like a young man, whose worries and problems are added day by day. An adult woman did not even open, and opened the door to the world of passionate sex, but it is worth saving one’s ecstasy, as doubt invades without demand: is it love? The purely carnal lust of Viola, like a female iteration of the torments of Nabokov’s Humbert, does not notice the psychological barriers and demolishes them more and more steeply with the rising wave. She reacts to the protest emerging in Stig’s eyes with the same mockery with which she is accustomed to perceive classical music. Naturally, the concept of mental crisis, familiar to Mahler, Beethoven and Wagner, does not mean anything to Viola. The insatiability of the wild female under the cute mask of Marika Lagercrantz is contrasted by Wiederberg with the respect with which two men treat each other. Such a surprise is that not all locks open a passionate key; some remain intact, despite the threat of sophisticated retribution generated by offended pride.
The approach of changes pleasant, but often shocking, permeates the tape. Viola's husband complains that the coming era of nylon threatens to leave him without earnings. Stig’s brother’s desire to serve on the submarine promises to shake the family. Life is rich in metamorphosis, and it is more difficult to swing along its paths than to succumb to lust and skip school again. The second title of the painting “Everything is fine” Wiederberg did not let the dust in his eyes, trying to shock him more. Much more likely, the director himself believed that any person sooner or later grows up, acquires the ability to soberly look at things, no matter how strong temptations they may have. Stig’s highly symptomatic remark to his mother, “Some other time when you’re older and wiser,” proves that true maturity is not related to age. Someone manages to form incomplete sixteen, and someone and forty – undergrowth.
The final picture of the Swedish master is like a two-act performance that does not need intermission. Interruptions are scenes in the cinema, where the Stig works at night. Wiederberg combines purely material needs with spiritual ones, and this is manifested in him in every record of an unsuccessful salesman husband who is able to feel real music and find salvation in it from what he cannot influence. Enmeshed in passions, lovers try to find the core, and the result of these searches depends on the ability to accept today with any of its inevitability. To be the center of attraction and manage events dream of many, but achieve only a few. An understanding of the laws of life itself is far more important than the needs of the moment, and certainly worth all the disappointments experienced. Wiederberg in his later years did not need another, following Elvira Madigan, tragedy. He left behind something else: a belief in the triumph of true beauty, which blossoms with the rising of the sun in the human soul.
Flowering is just beginning. She is only thirty-seven, a charming and humble teacher who has come to a small Swedish town; he is only fifteen, a timid and intelligent student who falls in love with her, if not at first, then at second sight. First, he will watch her, gently kiss the chair on which she was sitting, and then, waiting for the chance, exactly reflexively, clings to her lips. Somewhere on the other side of the gray horizon of the 40s there is a war, and the roar of flying planes comes from the sky, but human desires and passions remain beyond the flow of time and circumstances. The fast-paced feeling between a teacher and a student does not stop either the age difference or her marriage. This is the time when butterflies are born from pupae, spin and flutter.
Presented at the beginning by Bo Wiederberg, the “lecture of sexology” turns into a real bullfight of feelings – not in Shakespeare’s sublime, which the director himself portrayed in his “Elvira Madigan”, but the same in Marquesian captivating, exciting and fleeting, like youth itself. Youth is windy: boys talk endlessly about sex, dreaming of knowing its mysteries, and girls think about losing their virginity, and there is no strength to resist temptations. The stage of growing up with the Swedish director is closely related to Freudianism, and the personality of the hero develops through sexual attraction. He wants to discover a new world, and she wants to brighten up her old, not devoid of everyday anguish. Later, Giuseppe Tornatore will transform the same unusual first love into platonic, mostly locked in himself, but Wiederberg reveals the feelings and dilutes Freudianism with poetics and romantic-erotic pleasures, with the same passion showing a large leisurely plan to unbutton or playful glances at lessons.
When the time of falling in love passes, something always remains - the experience of the past, the sadness of the fleeting youth, the feeling of the frailty of everything that previously seemed unshakable. It goes back into routine reality, he, having grown up, strives to meet the future, because it is unbearable to stay in the past for a long time. But the director still keeps memories, which he returns to at the end of his life, projecting them and filling his tape with longing for lost youth and his hometown, where the first kiss, first love, first sex probably happened. Handel, Mahler, Tchaikovsky – so many ways to express the crazy moment of falling in love, and so few words for it that they are replaced by music. Wiederberg’s last work is a kind of nocturne dedicated to the frantic and full of passions of youth, which one wants to perpetuate among other things nothingness. Flowering is just beginning.
I was looking for a Scandinavian film and came across the film “Flowering Time”.
Clean water 2 hours of aesthetic pleasure. Beauty in everything. And distant and unlike us Sweden with its modest shirts, identical vests, strict long dresses and knitted tights, blond hair, and blue eyes. Wartime, when boys still studied separately at single desks. Diligence, upbringing, restraint, modesty and responsibility of students. We are invited to see the world of growing up boys of that time in harsh Sweden. And everything to us is sincere, true. Knitted sweaters, children's fun of the time, the interests of boys and flashed beautiful feelings - what I enjoyed in the first half of the film.
The film takes on a slightly different meaning. The growth of the main character, the unexpected rapprochement of some characters surprises and makes you think about a lot, including humanity and sympathy. It may be a movie about love, but I saw a movie about passion, the desire to possess at any cost, about revenge - in general, about burning fire and its consequences.
It's a beautiful game. Passion, as it should be, is insane. Love, support, care for each other in the family is amazing.
It is a must watch for those who love movies about what is very little in modern life. Holding your breath, you will enjoy the beauty painfully real and beautiful.
Wu Wiederberg’s painting “Flowering Time” when reading the synopsis causes quite understandable skepticism, but the final credits will appear on the screen, and you remember everything that for these 2 hours literally experienced with the hero, it becomes clear that this is not an ordinary drama about a student’s affair with a teacher.
Okay. The Swedish city of Malmo, at the height of World War II. In the school, where the main character is studying - 15-year-old Stig, an elderly pretty teacher Viola arranges. I don’t think anyone needs to know what age is 15. Short dialogues, testy glances, innocent flirtation on the part of an inept teenager, between the characters a wonderful "chemistry", thanks to the chic acting duo in the person of Johan Wiederberg and Marika Lagercrantz. Of course, such a relationship is doomed from the very beginning: it is at odds with morality, with society, but the relationship Viola and Stig really attractive, organic, no vulgarity, perversion. There is no such thing as watching.
In the end, the relationship between Stig and Viola is not so much admired as the relationship between Stig and Frank, the husband-inventor of Viola, a connoisseur of classical music. These relationships are not so much friendly, rather related, rather close, instead of fatherly love and attention, which the teenager clearly lacked.
Big pluses of the film in the acting, Winderberg Jr. is very beautiful and charismatic, Lagercrantz is pleasant and involuntarily causes a smile. With the musical accompaniment and script at the cinema, too, everything is fine. I was happy to take the time to watch this movie and I am very happy and impressed.
A brilliant picture of the famous Swedish director Bo Wiederberg. In this picture, Wiedeberg addresses and raises a very difficult theme of the maturation of a young personality. Maturation not only in the intimate but also in many other vital aspects.
The director takes his audience to his native Malmo. In 1943. World War II is thundering. Here in Sweden, only its echoes are heard, life flows in its course, measured and leisurely. Sweden, remaining neutral, does not make its citizens the same, they all have their own opinions about military action. One of the schools. Fifteen-year-old Stig falls in love with his adult teacher, passion flares up between them instantly and intimacy remains only a matter of time. Meanwhile, Stig’s brother is sent as a volunteer to the war, where he soon finds himself on a submarine.
Boo Wiederberg shows how through intimacy with an adult woman, the Stig will change and his previously unshakable internal positions will change. This attraction was destined to gradually subside. The director is a great master and with this picture he shows his viewer that not everything in this world revolves around sex and our intimate desires. Life is a complex and multifaceted thing and our hero begins to understand and realize it. With each subsequent sexual intercourse, the desire and attraction to an adult woman disappears from the Stig. The consequences of this will not be long in coming. And here's the tragic news about Stig's brother. This, in turn, completely undermines the inner state of our hero. He begins to analyze his actions and rethinks a lot.
For the teacher, this connection was an attempt to break out of the daily routine and languid marriage, which has long been not bringing joy. This pushes her into intimacy with her student. You can understand it.
The picture turned out to be very subtle in terms of presentation and display of everything planned. Not a hint of vulgarity. Everything is neat and refined. A well-deserved Oscar nomination in the Best Foreign Film category. The deepest picture of education, formation and maturation. With pedagogical morality, the picture can be ambiguous but very honest and truthful. There is nothing to complain about.
Oh, it's already February 14 and various creators of selections of thematic films. I am not a creator, but a lover of these collections. And so, stumbling upon one of them, I saw in the list the name “Flowering time”. I don't know about the others, but I was intrigued. I read the description of the film, which intrigued me even more: Stig, a 15-year-old high school student, falls in love with his schoolteacher Viola. She is 37 years old, but the age difference and the fact that she is married cannot stop the rapidly emerging mutual feeling.
Yes, I understand that it smells like perversion, pedophilia, etc., but for some reason I was always attracted to such stories, where the woman is older and the guy is much younger. The Forbidden Fruit, and How Its Sweetness Can Turn Both of Their Lives into Bitterness
From a psychological and physiological point of view, this is much more understandable than when an older man comes into contact with a much younger girl. Still, the loss of virginity for the fair sex is a brighter event than for a young man. And for a woman who is already over thirty, the love of a young person of the opposite sex is always an argument in favor of the fact that she is “nothing yet.”
In this film, a woman is not just a woman, but a teacher. She has power over him, surpasses a young man in love in all respects, and this, of course, cannot but flatter a woman who by her nature must obey male rules.
That seems to be the whole story. It remains only to watch and enjoy beautifully staged erotic scenes, soft and trembling. But no, the main message of this film is not that.
Through the sensual experience that the protagonist goes through, the young lover understands what the essence of life is. And yes, not everything comes down to sex, and that actually life is an extremely difficult thing, where you do not understand where marriage begins, and family happiness ends. He begins to understand why the teacher so easily agreed to contact him, and why she was wrong. His love melts with each new sexual act with her, and with each new conversation with her husband. How else? As we gain new knowledge, we cannot fail to analyze the situation.
This connection makes very young people more experienced and aware. That's not bad. After all, after you have already “discharged” it is easier to listen to your own feelings and understand what you really want. On the other hand, perhaps he would not have been so hurt by the realization of reality.
But what is done is done.
If the body aspires to adulthood, you have to come to terms with adult problems.
I would like to highlight the symbolism in the film. Today’s film industry is losing this gift, and in vain. After all, with the help of signs, allegories, the viewer is much more interesting to perceive the entire plot, he begins to analyze what is happening deeper, and the film remains in the depths of his soul for many, many years.
For those who are interested in history and politics, this movie is for you. Why? Long to explain! So swing, turn on and watch!!
In 1943, too, the sun was shining and it was raining, arms and acacias were blossoming, buds on trees and youthful desires swelled. Especially if your homeland Sweden looks at the Second World War, sitting in a cozy auditorium, and an elegant teacher appeared in the classroom, who stretched the flowering for a couple of decades. And gradually hobbies worthy of every self-respecting high school student (chewing on the stopwatch of passing gum, measuring in the toilet on recess with peeps and accompanying accessories, shooting flies from a sniper slingshot and peeping in the girls' locker room for peers) rise to the next stage of physical and psychological development.
Not suffering from Humbertian reflections, Fracken Viola immediately takes matters into his well-groomed pens, provoking the student to give a go-ahead awkward calf poking lips somewhere in the ear area. Without spending time on foreplays, overtures and other introductions, the English teacher attacks the blond Stig with all her sexuality. The stunned young man barely takes his breath in minutes of communication with a drunken salesman husband (the Swedish family is so Swedish), a little distracted by school (which the mentor makes miss), work in the cinema (there also reach the arms of a hot lady), family troubles (there is also an older brother missing). And trying to stop the acceleration turns into a knowledge of female bitchiness.
Flowering Time is Boo Wiederberg’s last film. Having chosen the festival path, the Swedish director has achieved certain success in his work, mainly nominated for the nomination of the most prestigious awards - "Oscar", "Golden Palm Branch", "Golden Bear", MIFF - and everything. In fact, any of his widescreen work elicited a nod of approval from the heads of masters and critics. Including, and the film about a big and insincere love under the measured tapping of chalk on the school board and a rare flyby of border planes also received an on-duty pat in the form of an Oscar nomination (passed forward the Dutch “Antonia”) and the Grand Prix in Berlin (conceded to the melodrama of Ang Lee “Sense and Sensibility”).
If Nabokov in “Lolita” was enough sharpness of age-related relations, the autobiographical drama of Wiederberg required strengthening, a little doping. The line of the older brother with boxing fights and going nowhere on the submarine was woven into the canvas of the narrative quite skillfully, but still stood out in a different color. But to develop the tragedy of the inventor-cuckold Kell or to show the wormholes of parental relations, directly arising from the plot, the director did not want / could not. Nor did he bring the climax of the mesalliance ties to the expected explosion, limiting himself to the defiant passage of the Stig during the graduation ceremony at the temple. However, Bo Wiederberg recognized the superiority of the poetics of the eternal rival Ingmar Bergman over his social presentation of film material, and, without abandoning it completely, softened the sharpest corners with a velvet cape of the frame.
If desired, it can be included in the collection of erotic films. With a slight provocation of the relations of minors (still seduced son of the director Johan Wiederberg at the time of filming was already over 20). With a couple of bedtime episodes and flirting on edge. But the desire to be outraged, to cry about morality, inadmissibility and the appearance of morality is absolutely not desirable. Rather, it draws to philosophize (the director, probably, too) about the moment of transition through the Rubicon of growing up. As the girls from the forgotten group "Lyceum" sang: "If you want, it's so simple: one - and tomorrow you will become an adult!" If you are destined to meet on the way the catalyst of love twenty years older, and time is compressed at times, but better in its course - year after year.
And gentle may scatters lilac aroma and birch air. Youth tears the shell with spring thunder and nightingale overflow. Ahead of the eternal summer of hot bodies and dizziness. And never, never will December come with the only joy at the bottom of a glass of whiskey and scattering yellowed photos. Thousands of young souls are revealed to meet the beckoning sun ray. Let someone sing on it wings, someone will go blind, flying to the very top, but they, in turn, will be replaced by new moths that have dropped unnecessary cocoons. Flowers are endless.
Not knowing what the movie was about, I put it in the line that Wikipedia put it in: movies about unequal love (or something like that). It's not that simple. The title “Flowering Time” should not be considered one-sidedly and immediately acquire the conviction that this film is only about passion, attraction, etc. Nope. Of course, at first (and, I must admit, for a long time) the picture evoked the reaction that it should: a smile, a bewitched look. And if it is possible otherwise with such a great game, I will not even emphasize who exactly. The hero of Johan Wiederberg, who is unable to overcome his passion, is not young (although you will not give her 37 for anything), but a beautiful teacher in crime (?) and the nakedness of her desires. I don’t know if you can talk about the sincerity of their feelings (well, feelings... I mean, of course, something sublime, and what did you think about?). From the very beginning, I understood and caught only outspoken passion, and I managed to play it, in my opinion, immaculately. Stig lives in an environment of teenagers who only think about sex, and then there is a suddenly attractive lady, an open neck, beautiful skin ... and youth, youth and desire take over. In general, the heroine of Marika Lagercrantz can be understood. An alcoholic husband with whom there is nothing to do, a lack of any diversity in communication ... and then suddenly a pretty teenager falls in love. Although I'll talk about falling in love again, I'm not at all sure of his sincerity. In the end, he himself admits its absence and the true motive of his actions.
Although, of course, I would like to believe, subject to intrusive prejudices, that this is love and so on. Of course not.
"Blooming Time" is a title more appropriate to the first part of the film (which, I confess, I was completely fascinated by). The second is more suitable "time of growing up", because flowering what happens to the main character, can not be called. There comes a time when the Stig is unable to lie to the person with whom he sits and who repents of his failures. However, he cannot overcome the attraction of youth. However, he finds a great way out! to use a simple neighbor in love with him.
With all my admiration for the beauty of Johan Wiederberg, his hero has become disgusting and alien to me. For a while. And then throwing, throwing - it did not work out either to save or to lose here. Of course, all this can be explained as “mistakes of youth”, but nevertheless. There is no clear position in his behavior (until a certain point). And he has a breakdown, a point at which he can no longer control emotions.
As many of you may have noticed, I can’t help but mention the psychology of the film. He's very serious. The growth of the hero above himself is obvious. From “youth young” to mocking yourself and at a small unsuccessful, but so sensual and exciting, frozen in passion by the past.
Great acting. Many people like to use this phrase wherever they get, but here is the case when you can talk about it and endlessly admire it. Acting is when there is no play as such. You will recall a moment of despair, unbridled anger and near-insanity when Viola comes to her home after a scene in a movie theater. And you feel pity, and a share of shame, for the fact that everything is so. And this is just one of many, no less sincere moments of “Blooming Pore”.
10 out of 10
Malmo, 1943. 15-year-old Stig irresistibly attracted by the mature beauty of 37-year-old married teacher Viola, which in turn is impressed by the immediate naivety of the student. Soon a forbidden passion flares up between them, the consequences of which do not keep themselves waiting for long.
The non-pedagogical novel offers a nostalgic account of the sexual revolution at a provincial Swedish school at the height of World War II. The lust of an adult female, beginning to feel a rapid withering, gradually gets out of control, and Viola finally loses her temper. And while her young lover answers at the board, she seductively unbuttons her skirt under the teacher's table.
And when the teenager, exhausted by her sexual pretensions, begins to shirk her “duties,” she does everything possible in revenge to leave him for a second year. The situation is complicated by the presence of a salesman husband, who is more suffering not from his wife's infidelities, but from the onset of the nylon era, which squeezes silk linen - his main source of income.
This seemingly passing detail carries an important dramatic load: animal sex turns into an ersatz - an artificial substitute for pure feelings, acting as a synthetic substitution that excludes the sincerity of human relationships.
The last film of Boo Wiederberg, a famous Swedish director (in terms of the number of prestigious international awards received, second only to Ingmar Bergman at home) brought him a third nomination for a foreign-language Oscar. Moreover, the tape became the leader of the Swedish hire, pushing Hollywood blockbusters from the first position.
Wiederberg ended his career by addressing a topic that once brought him worldwide fame: in 1967, he shot Elvira Madigan, probably his best picture. There passionate love was interrupted in a very Shakespearean way - the death of heroes. Now he again makes a journey into the past, but not at the end of the XIX century, but in the middle of the XXth, stopping in his native Malmö.
Reconstructing the everyday details of his childhood in a romantic way, Wiederberg not only resurrects the past, but turns the filming process into psychological education lessons, as he uses his son Johan in the role of Stig. Clearly ambiguous and morally vulnerable pedagogical act turns into the appearance of one of the most honest films about the formation of feelings.