“La jeune femme à l’aiguille” : gratuitous violence or radical proposition?

This black-and-white Swedish film tells the story of Karoline, a young working-class woman in the 1910s, who is abandoned by her boss and lover as soon as she gets pregnant. Her husband returns from the Great War, disfigured in a Francis Bacon-way. Karoline falls under the spell of Dagmar Overbye, who, for a fee, helps unwed mothers place their children within rich families. In fact, she kills them. Dagmar drugs and « loves » Karoline (breast-feeding seems to fascinate Von Horn).

Everything becomes nebulous, but we can still gather that the world is horribly horrible, and that Dagmar is just a useful though idiot cog in the great machine of capitalist and patriarchal society – which isn’t an uninteresting proposition, after all, but not shown that way. In the end, art – the circus, with its reassuring and maternal tent – will be the only possible refuge for the freaks. Incidentally, Magnus Von Horn has seen « all » black-and-white films – citing Dreyer, Bergman, Stroheim, Sjöström, the Lumière brothers, etc. – but such accumulation of disparate references has never been known to produce a masterpiece.