Another box-set from the BFI full of Bergman treasures, from core catalogue classics such as Fanny and Alexander (1982), Cries and Whispers (1972), Autumn Sonata (1978) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973) to less well-known films such as After the Rehearsal (1984) and From the Lives of Marionettes (1980).
Some of what’s nourishing the debut album by Sweden’s Dina Ögon is evident. A Bossa Nova jazz-pop essence evokes Brazil’s Quarteto em Cy. There’s a trip-hop undertow. Vocal lines bring to mind Free Design. Less easy to pinpoint is a melodic sensibility which seems to be derived from local traditions; echoing the sort of fusion pioneered by Jan Johansson’s Jazz på svenska and Merit Hemmingson when she reframed folk music on the Svensk folkmusik på beat albums.
Johanne Lykke Holm’s spellbinding novel Strega recounts one teen’s journey into womanhood. Leaving her parental home to work with eight other girls in a lavish but mouldering hotel, Rafa grapples with what it means to be a woman in a world literally and culturally saturated with gender-based violence.
Ruben Östlund builds theatres of cruelty for the elite, petri dishes for pretension and hypocrisy. After Force Majeure’s family implosion at a ski resort and The Square’s art crowd Armageddon, Triangle of Sadness casts off with a superyacht which becomes a vomitorium when it hits choppy waters, in his second consecutive Palme d’Or-winner.
The artist Hilma af Klint, born in 1862, was way ahead of her time. A Swedish mystic who believed that spirits were guiding her hand, she was a contemporary of Kandinsky and Mondrian but her abstract art remained unrecognised. She didn’t fit in to the male-dominated art world.
It’s now six years since Goat last released an album of new songs and, despite a live disc and one of B-sides and other odds and sods that have appeared in the meantime, its Requiem title suggested that it might have been their last call to arms. However, do not fear, our favourite pagan psychedelicists are back in the ring and on top form with a lively soundtrack that is more than enough to drag even the most dancefloor phobic up on their feet to shake a leg.
The release of each box-set in the BFI’s Blu-ray four-volume collection of Ingmar Bergman films is a delight. Volume 3 provides some of the Swedish master’s essential works.
The third album from Stockholm rowdies Viagra Boys doesn’t muck about with what they do, but it’s more persistently punkin’ than their last. There’s more than a snifter of Iggy and the Stooges in both the vocal style and the raucous over-amped riffage, but Viagra Boys spice their sound with electronics and, where early-Seventies Ig was always about untrammelled “Raw Power”, this lot are as happy to offer wry lyrical critiques among the all-out stompers.
Initially, the weird thing about this is it’s being released as a Neneh Cherry album rather than a compilation of artists doing Neneh Cherry covers, which is what it is. That said, awareness slowly grows of a kindred sensibility to recent Neneh Cherry output, the esoteric jazzual spirit that’s imbued her last couple of albums.
French director Mia Hansen-Løve’s graceful, intriguingly open-ended seventh feature, and her English-language debut, is set on Fårö, the island that Ingmar Berman loved.