ALL THINGS FAIR (24)

Directed by: Bo Wideberg

Starring: Johan Wideberg, Marika Lagercrantz

The Pitch: Sixteen-year-old schoolboy in WW2 Sweden gets involved with his married, thirtyish teacher.

Theo Sez: A bewildering mess. Setting itself up as a story of a boy's sexual awakening, and establishing a strong attraction between the kid and his schoolteacher / lover (with a soprano warbling on the soundtrack every time they exchange soulful glances!), it then has her simply disappear for most of the second half while the film loses itself in a welter of irrelevant sub-plots. The problem is perhaps that director Wideberg - an old warhorse chiefly remembered for helming "Elvira Madigan", back in the days of flower-power - imbues the film with a (modern) Scandinavian's laisser-faire attitude to sexual matters. Neither boy nor teacher feels particularly guilty about the affair, nor is her husband terribly concerned when he finds out - which is all very admirable but makes the relationship rather a non sequitur, forcing the film to look elsewhere for drama. It duly does, rambling on about the boy's brother (a sailor on a sub, fighting the Nazis) or the husband's classical-music fixation, finally stumbling into a melodramatic ending with most of the characters knee-deep in angst and drinking heavily - though, given their live-and-let-live philosophy, it's something of a mystery how they got there (clue: arbitrary plot twists and muddled characterisation). Incoherent and anachronistic, ALL THINGS FAIR really has only one major asset: the young star's fresh, eager-to-please performance.