How Prurient Sexism Undermines the Careers of Talented Actresses: The Cases of Lena Nyman and Tang Wei

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Dear reader, have you ever found yourself wondering, �Whatever happened to Lena Nyman?� No? Well that�s ok, because I�m happy to do the wondering for you.

Lena Nyman was a Swedish actress, born in 1944 and deceased in 2011, when she appears to have died of all sorts of things (or at least Wikipedia makes it sound that way), both COPD and Guillen-Barr� Syndrome, a terrible mishmash of illness.  She first appeared on the scene in the 1960�s, when she acted in several films directed by Vilgot Sj�man, including the controversial 491 (1964), which I�ve never seen because, as I have continuously repeated throughout the history of this blog, international film distribution is dominated by greedy philistines, may God damn them all.  So I only know that it�s �controversial� by hearsay.  I don�t think anyone in the U.S. got to see it.  But in 1967, Sj�man came out with his international taboo-shattering masterpiece I am Curious (Yellow), with Nyman in the lead.  The film (along with its companion film, I am Curious (Blue) (these are the colors of the Swedish flag)), presents a digressive and genre-mixing exploration of politics (particularly sexual politics) in the post-war Swedish welfare state.  The premise of the two films is that Sj�man has cast Nyman to appear in a film about sexual politics in Sweden.  This is the same film-about-the-making-of-itself approach that would define virtually every post-Maoist Godard movie.

Lena Nyman, with Olaf Palme (l).

So what does I am Curious (Yellow (and Blue, while we�re at it, they�re basically the same movie)) look like?  Well, we have documentary footage (Sj�man interviewing Martin Luther King when he came to Sweden to accept his Nobel Peace Prize and Yevgeny Yevtushenko�or Jevgeny Jevtushenko, as the Swedish titles render it�speaking to students); we have Lena Nyman doing on the street interviews with random Swedes, in which she asks them about political, economic, and sexual questions in a manner reminiscent of Jean Rouch�s and Edgar Morin�s Chronicle of a Summer(1960) and Pier Paolo Pasolini�s Comizi d�Amore(1965); and we have Lena Nyman having sex with various partners while trying to avoid her controlling mother and trying to spite her father, who joined a volunteer regiment to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War but mysteriously returned to Sweden a few weeks later, for which Lena has never forgiven him.  In Yellow, she has a large portrait of Franco on her bedroom wall, to serve as a reminder of her father�s treachery (in Blue, it has been replaced with a picture of Karl Marx� or possibly Martin Luther King, I don�t remember, it�s been a while since I saw these films).

Now, when you watch these movies nowadays, the general impression is of an innovative, Brechtian kind of political film, in the best tradition of the French New Wave.  It�s very playful and freewheelingly digressive.  Alas, his is not how the movie was received in the U.S.  When Barney Rosset of Grove Press brought the movie to America (winning an obscenity case in the process), the good people of America weren�t interested in Swedish politics; rather, they were interested in dicks.  And tits.  And buttocks.  All of which can be found in this movie, where the actors have (or at least simulate) sex without hiding under a blanket or waiting for the camera to respectfully pan away. 

So all across the land (from sea to shining sea), the word went out: �There�s a sex movie! With sex!  But it�s also an art movie, so you don�t have to be embarrassed to see it!  All the cool kids are seeing it! Norman Mailer says it�s cool!� And the people came out in droves to feast their depraved eyes on liberated Swedish flesh!  And Christ, were they disappointed.  Because, while there�s certainly sex to be had from time to time, Nyman and co. spend far more time protesting the Vietnam War than they do exposing their genitals.  And according to America�s frustrated connoisseurs, the sex wasn�t even that hot.  Nyman, they argued, was weird looking (I think she�s lovely, but I also don�t want to engage in the argument over her looks at all; there�s a similar argument afoot over another Lena, the American Lena, Ms. Dunham, whose frequent on-screen nudity would probably be a lot less provocative to people if she were skinnier; and there�s another argument I don�t want to get into, about actresses� weight, it�s disgraceful, it�s insulting, it�s rank philistinism, God damn you all for even making me bring it up; even in the Criterion essay for Dunham�s Tiny Furniture, the respected essayist Philip Lopate finds it necessary to refer to her �zaftig body,� and I didn�t know what �zaftig� meant, I looked it up, it�s Yiddish for plump or full-bodied).

And so after making a licentious splash, I am Curious (Yellow) just ended up pissing people off.  And when Blue was brought out here shortly thereafter, nobody bothered to see it (and its sexual content was rapidly becoming par for the course). And so what happened to Nyman?  Now, I don�t want to trivialize her subsequent achievements (she apparently had a successful career on the Swedish stage), but her film career seemed to fizzle (at least in terms of what got released internationally).  Her only major film after I am Curious (Blue) was Ingmar Bergman�s Autumn Sonata (1978), where she has a supporting role as Liv Ullmann�s handicapped sister (and maybe it�s a small world in the Swedish film industry, because Vilgot Sj�man�s first major work was Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie, which is a feature-length making-of (avant la lettre) about Bergman�s Winter Light).

So Nyman�s star turn in the I am Curious movies ended up screwing her over in the long run.  She shattered taboos about the depiction of sexuality in cinema, but once everyone had moved on, she was left behind (the same with Sj�man, by-the-by, I can�t tell you anything about his subsequent career).  And now, if they remember her at all, it�s as that girl who made the sex movie, not as the woman who made the political/avant-garde art movies.

There�s still a strange dissonance over sex in cinema today.  People clearly want to see it, but they don�t know how to feel about the people participating in it, especially the actresses.  As an example, let�s look at Ang Lee�s 2007 film Lust, Caution, which features graphic sex scenes (or the simulation thereof, it�s unclear) between Tang Wei and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. 

Now, while Leung was already an established star at this point, this was Tang�s first big role.  And everybody in the Sinosphere loved it (it was rated NC-17 in the U.S., so of course nobody here saw it), and everyone was �cool� with the graphic sexuality on display (or at least the ticket sales suggest they were cool with it).  But what happened to the main actors afterwards? Leung continued on as one of Hong Kong�s most beloved leading men�it didn�t matter that we�d seen his balls flopping around�while Tang, who was based in Mainland China, essentially found herself blacklisted, because the establishment there didn�t feel comfortable with the kind of nudity and sexuality that she�d displayed.  Now, there are certainly other factors at play in the discrepancy between the reception of Leung and Tang: Leung was already an established star, Tang was freshly arrived on the scene; Leung was from Hong Kong, Tang was from Mainland China.  But the key difference between their post-Love, Caution careers comes down to the simple fact that Leung is as a man and Tang is a woman.  His sexuality is somehow less threatening than hers.  And so even if they�ve both participated in a provocative film, Tang is going to receive far worse treatment than Leung, because female sexuality is still shocking (part of it may have to do with the fact that Lee depicted the couplings between Tang�s and Leung�s characters with style and seriousness; he neither played it for laughs nor made it look vulgar and depraved, which is what I suspect a lot of people are used to).

Well, unlike Nyman, Tang�s career looks to be getting back on track.  In 2011, she had a prominent role in Peter Chan Ho-sun�s Donnie Yen vehicle, Dragon (a Hong Kong production, so maybe that�s where her future is).  So hopefully, as Tang Wei continues to make films, people will become less awful, and then she won�t end up like poor Lena Nyman.