Exposed (1971)

This is How Movies Should Be Made

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

A run-of-the-mill erotic fantasy film (that also owes much of it's narrative charms to Bunuel's classic Belle de Jour (1969)), is elevated by the elfin-like, nubile-innocent beauty of Swedish star Christina Lindberg. Her ethereal Lena, like Catherine Deneuve's Severine, displays an ambiguity in her sense of reality. We are never really sure if her sexual experiences throughout the film are fantasies or not. Lena drifts from Jan (Bjorn Adelly), a mummy's boy, and Helge (Heinz Hopf), a seeming playboy who offers her to friends who hangout at parties at his house.The direction and cinematography are quite loose, giving it's mis-en- scene an elemental idea of realism. But with this technique, the result has very little suspense or atmosphere. Beginning with Lena taking off from boyfriend, Jan, hitchhiking out to a country house. She is picked up by a couple who go with her, and Lena imagines an encounter with the man of the couple. From here Lena simply goes back and forth between the two men who offer their utter love to her. She seems uninterested in either. We are reminded throughout the film that Helge took some nude photographs of her, and he attempts to blackmail her - something that never really happens, and some humanity suddenly comes from the sullen- seeming Lena, as she demands that she have them and the negatives.Whilst the film has a reputation for it's depiction of sexuality, and now relatively soft sexual violence, it is rarely shocking. Also, with a very thin plot, it plods along in quite a pedestrian fashion. However, this is not to say that the time spent with this film is certainly no waste of time. Christina Lindberg is incredibly watchable. She radiates beauty, and has an incredible presence. So, with utter beguiled fascination, the film goes from being a two star reward, to a three.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Exposed (1971) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Christina Lindberg fans can rejoice because another one of her films has been released to DVD. In this film she plays a 17-year-old girl who gets taken advantage of by an older man. He took some nude photos of her and is now blackmailing her, which doesn't sit well with a mama's boy that she's currently dating. There are about two other plot lines that could be brought up but, as the director states in the featurette, the story really isn't that important when you've got the beautiful Lindberg running around nude for 60% of the running time. The movie actually manages to be more than just your typical sexploitation film because the story itself isn't too bad and we get some decent performances. The entire subplot of Lindberg's character imagining bad things happening to her might have been a homage to Bunuel's BELLE DE JOUR but it works. These fantasy sequences range from her being raped, to her death with some nudist and various others. Lindberg turns in a good, if certainly not great performance, which is more than enough. She certainly makes us care for her character even though we really don't learn too much about her. The biggest issue with this film and many other sexploitation movies is that there's just not enough going on for a running time over seventy-five minutes. Clocking in at 91-minutes this film runs out of steam towards the final half-hour and there's just way too much added stuff. There's a five-minute sequence, which shows us the movie TARZAN TRIUMPHS but it's not just a clip but an entire five-minute sequence! The print has the Swedish subtitles as well, which was strange to see and I'm curious if Warner knows about it. There are other sequences that could have used some editing as well. With that said, most people are coming to this film to see Lindberg and you get plenty to look out, which is good enough for the film to work.

Lena, a nubile young lass, has been seeing an older man behind the back of her young boyfriend Jan. When she tells Jan, he rewards her with a good few smacks around the chops and she flees town. Lena hitches a lift with with a middle-aged businessman, who parks down a side road and rapes her. But this turns out to be an idle fantasy of Lenas, and when the man drops her off she is picked up by a male/female couple of swingers who she takes to her boyfriend's mother's cabin in the woods. The three of them share an idyll there, broken only by another fantasy of Lena's that the woman is murderously jealous of her, and late at night she watches them making love on the living room floor.The next day Jan appears and, after a car chase (which ends with a fantasy from Lena of she & the couple burning to death), Jan drags his errant girlfriend back to the town. There she confesses that the older man, Helge, has been blackmailing her into taking part in orgies because he has some nudie pictures of her. Helge is violent and obsessed with Lena, and the middle section of the film is split between the girl getting lovey-dovey with Jan and being stalked by the menacing Helge. Eventually Lena runs away from Jan when his mother discovers the nudie shots (calling her a whore) & is followed home by the stalking Helge. He gets into the house and, in a particularly creepy and uncomfortable scene, ties her to the bed (with her collusion), cuts off her dress and has sex with her. She gets an arm free and uses the knife to stab her lover/assailant in the back. There follows an extraordinary shot in which she remains tied up (by both hands) with his stabbed corpse lying on top of her. The next day, Lena's mother arrives back from holiday. Helge has gone and Lena is taken shopping for a new dress. She meets Jan and all seems okay, but for the fact that Lena is still thinking about seeing Helge. There is some question by now as to whether Helge actually exists or whether he's another fantasy of Lena's.Exposed is intriguing because it suggests that Lena's sexuality is a complex and messy state of affairs, and that there is no longer the surety that she would prefer to be in a "normal" relationship with a bland ordinary bloke - perhaps her sexual life runs to more exotic and dangerous pursuits? Or perhaps Helge is a fantasy of the predatory male gaze which will always follow her, thinking about coercion, submission and violence? There's no ground for the definite to exist in Lena's life, torn as she is between a bland reality and a sadistic world of fantasy which is itself potentially true.Lena's story takes place in nicely furnished but faceless rooms (sometimes when Lena is alone in her bedroom, the visuals are reminiscent of Munch) or what Deleuze would call "any-space-whatevers": shopping precincts, streets, petrol stations and stairwells. This is a world which is meaningless but for a series of impulses, be they normalising or sexually deviant. Lena has no definite self, she is a series of reactions or acquiescences to the desires of the men in her life, which might or might not be her desires. In the end, though a lot of flesh has been exposed in the film, the self is as opaque as it was before any camera was pointed at it.Christina Lindberg's affectless face has rarely been better used than in the role of the nullity, Lena. The character confesses that "I feel too little and know too much" and in the world of experience that the film exposes, Lena is not alone in her lack of feeling: as she and her mother walk as typical consumers along the commercial streets of the town, they pass a sex-shop district with windows displaying the same kind of pictures that Lena might have posed for; she asks her mother what she thinks of them, and the mother replies "soon everything will be like that; nobody will feel anything any more." In its modest way, Exposed is a prophecy of a world which was, as the sexual revolution ended, just being born: a world of impulse and craving, the vain search for satisfaction, boring conformism or soulless promiscuity and kicks.Scored with a haunting, harmonica-led theme tune and filmed in stark realist colours, Exposed deserves to have a higher reputation.

Cristina Lindberg starred in a few Swedish movies in the 70's and also in some German porn movies for those who didn't know.A lot of these exploitation movies she starred in were OK but not greater than that. Although almost all of the movies she was in sucked big time including this film, Thriller - A cruel picture is worth seeing. Quentin Tarantino was inspired by some of her movies but most of all Thriller.This movie however is very weird. Cristina plays a character named Lena, a 17 year old girl who seems lost and keeps daydreaming all the time. She goes on a very short road trip and gets in some trouble and from there the story gets duller and duller. Although this movie has a lot of nudity in it and Cristina was somewhat of hotty, this movie isn't worth seeing at all. For the Swedish crowd it could be of some interest considering that you'll see Sweden in 70's and the film itself is considered to be a classic.Conclusion: If you like Cristina Lindberg and those types of movies you should perhaps see it if you don't like those types of movies, watch something else.