The White Wall

Given that its central performance by Harriet Andersson is technically perfect, this study of female frustration displays hardly any other redeeming features. Settling for a one-track, frankly boring delineation of the tribulations of a newly-separated woman of 35, it progresses (infinitely slowly) by means of a line of clichéd encounters with representative boorish males and sympathetic girlfriend towards a cop-out fadeout that is the ultimate in arty pretentiousness. Throughout, the film treats Andersson's character as a 'specimen' under glass, even going so far as to parallel her situation with that of her son's goldfish. A sign of Björkman's inability to think his subject through is that he has to despatch the young son from the narrative halfway through; while his oblique references to Bergman merely highlight the emptiness of his own concept.