Cinema: Sex with a Smile

People Meet and Sweet Music Fills the Heart is an unlikely title for an even more unlikely movie. Part parody, part pornography, part romantic melodrama with a musical number or two thrown in for good measure, People is a surrealistic practical joke on the audience. Characters contradict themselves, and individual scenes ricochet crazily off one another, effectively destroying most logic and all dramatic continuity. Out of this carefully crafted chaos comes a film that is by turns boring, arch and gratifyingly funny.

The narrative is more pattern than plot. In a train compartment, a student named Hans (Erik Wedersoe) eyes a blonde dancer (Harriet Andersson) and dreams of his fiancee and his mistress. Suddenly, scenes of the train’s pistons pounding are intercut. A title flashes “Could anything be more erotic than a train?” Hans and the dancer have a quick assignation in the W.C. He goes to see his fiancee, who has turned into a whore. She leaves for America with a man whom Hans has recently cuckolded. In a hectic burlesque of Schnitzler’s La Ronde, every character’s dramatic destiny is made improbably interdependent until People ends, without resolution, in a mock-sentimental finale.

People was allowed to be imported from Denmark only after I Am Curious (Yellow) made it safely through U.S. courts. This is an ironic state of affairs, since People could easily be interpreted as a satire on the current vogue for explicit cinematic sexuality. Anyone who watched the two kids coupling on a balustrade or in a tree in Yellow will surely appreciate the absurd acrobatics of the scene in the train toilet. Writer-Director Henning Carlsen often dwells too long on a single joke or effect, and it might be argued that he shrewdly exploits permissiveness while satirizing it, but such reservations do nothing to diminish People’s raucous vitality. After the sociological tedium of Yellow, and the adolescent eroticism of such other Scandinavian imports as Inga and I, a Woman, Part II, the jaunty humor of People is a welcome relief.