I have watched this picture once before, in my youth, and then I thought it was just boring crap. But as this movie is highly praised by Swedish movie critics, I just decided to give it another chance - in case I would realize its greatness now when I am older, and have more experience of both real life and movies. The result: it was still just boring crap! And absurd, bizarre, stupid and entirely without meaning or message, into the bargain...
By the way, I have always thought that both the writers and several of the actors, are greatly over-valued in general. The duo "Hasse & Tage", who both wrote and performed in their variety shows, stand-up comedy, "witty" monologue etc., and wrote several books that were supposed to be comic but were not... But they were, and still are for those generations who still remember them, some kind of holy cows that one was not allowed to criticize. If one did, one got to hear that one did not understand their greatness... So everybody in the 1960:s-1980:s had to pretend that they did!
The same goes for the actors. Except for the afore-mentioned Hasse & Tage, who were no more successful as actors than as writers, there are a few other names that got a lot of critical acclaim at this time. For instance: Monica Zetterlund and Birgitta Andersson, both of whom I have always only found cheap and vulgar, and Gösta Ekman junior, who actually only lived on the name of his father Hasse Ekman and his grand-father: the very great, handsome and charismatic actor Gösta Ekman senior. Gösta junior has nothing of Hasse's or Gösta senior's star quality.
With this said, maybe one can relate to the plot in this movie just a little, as a Swede. Because we are all brought up on that national-romantic idea of a traditional Midsummer celebration or (as in this movie) cray-fish party in the famous Swedish Archipelago, with all the proper ingredients (such as aquavit, dill, fiddler's folk-music, bare cliffs, waves, rowing-boats and paper moons with lanterns in them... and of course cray-fish) in the company of very good friends. But then of course in reality, most Swedes either never attend this kind of party in the archipelago in their lives, or if they do they will get disappointed from a lot of reasons...
In fact, I think the beginning of this movie was alright, because it depicted this disappointment, when a lot of bad things happened so that the Swedish Dream cray-fish party turned into a night-mare instead. The mistake, though, was that the movie was too long, and that the misadventures became more and more unrealistic and absurd. Then you could not relate to it anymore - in fact it soon turned embarrassingly stupid...
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