The Girls

Mai Zetterling's 1968 Swedish film follows three actresses touring Sweden with Aristophanes's Lysistrata. Performing to audiences who do not understand it, they begin to see their own lives and marriages mirrored in the play, and the drama onstage, the reality offstage and surreal fantasy start to run together. The trio of Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom is familiar from Bergman's films. The film left cinemas after three weeks and was disparaged by the male critics of the day; centring women's interior lives while reducing men to indistinguishable, impotent figures was not well received. Over the years it was reassessed as a key work of feminist cinema. Zetterling's formal nerve lies in refusing to separate narrative from fantasy. Who it's for: viewers interested in Swedish cinema, feminist film history and formal experiment. Who it's not for: anyone wanting straightforward narrative, or who will struggle to follow the passages between reality and fantasy.