The premise beneath the play
The Girls is a Swedish drama from 1968 that adapts Aristophanes’ Lysistrata not as political farce but as a quiet, cumulative portrait of three actresses rehearsing and touring the play while negotiating motherhood, marriage, infidelity, and professional erasure. Mai Zetterling and David Hughes refocus the ancient plot away from collective action and into interior contradiction: the women do not withhold sex to end war, but struggle to hold space for their own lives amid domestic expectation and cultural indifference. The film treats theatre not as metaphor but as labour — rehearsals are tired, costumes ill-fitting, audiences disengaged. It aims to show how feminist consciousness forms not in rallies or declarations but in shared glances, delayed departures, and unspoken withdrawals. Its ambition is structural: to make visible the friction between public performance and private exhaustion, using the frame of classical adaptation to expose the persistent invisibility of women’s work. It does not argue for change so much as register its absence — a documentary impulse dressed in theatrical costume.
The look of it
The story unfolds across a provincial tour, each stop blurring into the next: cramped dressing rooms, indifferent hotel lobbies, half-empty auditoriums where polite applause masks incomprehension. Rune Ericson’s cinematography avoids flourish — his camera stays close, often at shoulder height, holding on faces rather than gestures, letting silences accumulate. Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom perform with restraint; their characters’ frustrations leak through posture more than dialogue. Erland Josephson and Gunnar Björnstrand appear as men whose authority is assumed, not earned — their lines are brief, their presence heavy. Michael Hurd’s score is sparse, mostly piano and strings, used only to punctuate transitions, never to underscore emotion. The theatrical scenes within the film are deliberately flat, underlit and slightly out-of-focus, distinguishing them from the documentary texture of the women’s offstage lives. Editing by Lena Rådström moves without emphasis: no montage, no flash cuts, just duration — a bus ride, a meal, a pause before answering the phone. This refusal of emphasis is itself a formal choice, aligning technique with theme.
What sticks
What lands is the weight of accumulated smallness: the way Marianne’s toddler clings at the station, the repeated shot of Gunilla folding laundry while listening to her husband list household duties, the quiet exhaustion in Liz’s voice when she says she’s ‘tired of putting him first’. These moments gain force through repetition and refusal to dramatise — there are no breakdowns, no shouting matches, only the slow accrual of resignation and then, finally, resolve. The film’s most effective sequence is the dinner scene: not because of what is said, but because of how the men’s intrusion escalates — first patronising, then insistent, then hostile — while the women stay seated, exchanging looks, their solidarity wordless until Marianne speaks. The staging feels lived-in, the threat unvarnished but not sensationalised. Likewise, the final party scene works because it arrives without fanfare: Liz’s announcement of divorce is delivered mid-conversation, met with murmurs, not gasps. The film trusts the audience to feel the shift in air, not be told it.
Where it falters
What does not land is the framing device of the Lysistrata production itself. The play-within-the-film remains stubbornly inert: its staging lacks rhetorical force, its themes are neither clarified nor complicated by the actresses’ real-life parallels. When Liz attempts to discuss the play with the audience, the scene registers as awkward rather than incisive — the actors playing audience members look bored, not resistant, and the male colleague who intervenes does so without malice or irony, making the moment feel underwritten rather than subversive. The script gives the women rich inner lives but rarely lets them articulate those lives to each other directly; conversations circle around duty and fatigue without naming power or structure. Some supporting characters — particularly the stockbroker husband and the director — remain types rather than people, their function purely schematic. The film’s resistance to exposition means certain tensions — why the tour persists despite poor reception, why the company doesn’t adapt the play — go unexamined, leaving gaps that feel like omissions rather than ellipses.
What it’s really about
The themes that matter are not those of ancient comedy but of mid-century Swedish domesticity: the division of time between care and craft, the invisibility of reproductive labour, the assumption that women’s ambitions must be deferred or justified. The film treats motherhood not as identity but as condition — something that shapes availability, mobility, credibility. It also examines how professional life for women is perpetually provisional: contracts are short-term, roles interchangeable, authority conditional on compliance. There is no villain, only systems — the theatre hierarchy, the marriage contract, the childcare infrastructure — that operate without stating their terms. The film’s quietest theme is endurance as resistance: not defiance, but persistence in the face of constant diminishment. It shows how feminism operates not through rupture but recalibration — choosing to stay on tour, choosing to speak at dinner, choosing to name a desire for divorce. These are not grand acts, but they are irreversible. The film’s moral centre lies in its refusal to separate the personal from the political while refusing to reduce either to slogan.
Who it’s for
This film is for viewers who value sustained attention over exposition, who find resonance in understatement, and who recognise that feminist cinema need not shout to unsettle. It rewards patience with texture — the grain of a sweater, the sound of a suitcase on linoleum, the hesitation before a sentence ends. It is not for those who require narrative propulsion, clear antagonists, or cathartic resolution. Anyone expecting satire or polemic will find it too muted; anyone needing psychological explanation for every decision will find it withholding. Those who dislike films where characters think more than they speak, or where silence carries more weight than dialogue, should look elsewhere. The film assumes familiarity with mid-century European social norms — its critique gains force from what it leaves unsaid about gendered expectation — so viewers unfamiliar with that context may miss some of its precision. A viewer who values thematic clarity over atmospheric accumulation will likely leave dissatisfied.
Is it worth your evening?
Yes, it is worth your evening — but only if you are prepared to meet it on its own terms: slow, unsentimental, and structurally patient. Its power lies in accumulation, not climax, and its rewards emerge in retrospect, not in the moment. It is not entertainment in the conventional sense, nor is it didactic. Those who disagree — critics who called it ‘unfocused’ in 1968, or modern viewers who expect tighter plotting — would likely find it unrewarding unless they adjust their expectations of what a political film must do. What would change the verdict is a demand for immediate impact: this film asks for reflection, not reaction. Its value is in its refusal to simplify, and in the quiet insistence with which it holds space for women’s unremarkable, indispensable labour — on stage and off.
