Torment

It's difficult to say much more about a nice, pretty film than that.

Torment is a Swedish movie starring Alf Kjellin as an artistic, sensitive Scandinavian preppie who falls in love with the local tobacco shop salesgirl, played by Mai Zetterling. The third member of the tormented triangle is the boy's middle-aged, lecherous Latin teacher, a tyrant named Caligula.

Vidgren's inner turmoil as a young artist-type chafing at the halters of a narrow secondary school environment and Caesar's Gallic Wars becomes an unbearable torture in the days following the night he finds Miss Olsen, the town tobacco-shop girl, staggering dead drunk through the streets. Despite Vidgren's initial revulsion at the girl and her unsavory reputation, the two quickly become bosom companions, as Vidgren tastes the joy of his first affair.

The girl herself is tormented and driven to drink by the swinish brutality of a man who Vidgren learns too late is none other than the school's "pet sadist," Caligula, who in turn is tormented by an epic inferiority complex, which brings out the classical beast in him. The tragic ending of the affair severs Vidgren's educational umbilical cord and sends him out into the invigorating world alone, happy to be free.

The best scenes in the film center around Caligula's Latin class, and show the teacher drumming passive paraphrastics and ablative absolutes into his cowering pupils with a vengeance which would have brought joy to his namesake.

Torment is a pretty film because the boy breaks so cleanly with his past, because Caligula is a master beast, and because Miss Olsen drinks herself to death with brandy, rather than cheap rotgut. But the film never rises to a high level because the trio's, and most especially the boy's torment lacks both the moral depth of Joyce's Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and the personal intensity of Anderson's Tea and Sympathy. The three are unhappy, but not convincingly miserable.

Torment won the Cannes Film Festival award in 1946. The war had reduced the number of choices that year considerably.