Exponerad

Christina Lindberg in an exploitation film that at times (perhaps unintentionally) becomes experimental art.

17-year-old Lena is alone in the city while her parents are on holiday. She is torn between her innocent boyfriend Jan and Helge (Heinz Hopf), an older, worldly and perverse photographer of young women. Christina Lindberg also acted opposite Hopf in Thriller – en grym film (1973). Lena goes for a walk with Lars (Janne «Loffe» Carlsson) and his wife. The couple party, swim naked and have sex in front of wide-eyed Lena. Back in the big city, she is once again drawn to Helge, his sick parties and erotic games. Memories, the present, violent fantasies and reality mingle in the sexually confused young woman’s mind.

Christina Lindberg, then 21 years old and Sweden’s most famous centerfold and sexploitation film star, plays Lena in one of her early roles. Exponerad premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where Christina’s presence became the year’s sensation in newspapers around the world. The film was her ticket to Japan and two roles for Toei, in Sex & Fury and The Kyoto Connection.

Apparently, there were no artistic ideas behind Exponerad, which was discussed in an interview in the Swedish magazine Fib Aktuellt in May 1971.

The headline read: «Take off those damn clothes! We’re going to make money!» This was accompanied by a picture of a naked Christina in front of Stockholm City Hall, where PR man Henry Sidoli had torn off her coat and surrounded her with men in tuxedos.

The article continued:

«The film is completely commercial. It has no artistic ambitions. But we have to make films like this to make money.»

And yet the film was quite subversive and artistically interesting.

Christina Lindberg had 21 feature-film roles between 1971 and 1980. Ten were leading roles. The most notable is Thriller – en grym film, which was a major inspiration for Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Alongside him, Sean Baker, Gaspar Noé and Adrián García Bogliano—the director of her 2019 comeback film Black Circle—are considered among her biggest fans. Lindberg has toured the world since 2006, meeting fans at film festivals and conventions.

Janne «Loffe» Carlsson, who plays Lars, was the drummer in the popular band Hansson & Karlsson (1966–1969), a typical feature of the psychedelic flower-power movement of the time. He also played with some of the decade’s biggest artists. He helped found Pistolteatern in 1964, where he began acting. He first became famous as an actor in Lars Lennart Forsberg’s television adaptation of Slas’s Vem älskar Yngve Frej (1973), followed by two film adaptations of the same author’s work: På palmblad och rosor (1976) and Henrietta (1983).

His real fame came with Bengt Lagerkvist’s television adaptation of Jolo’s Någonstans i Sverige (1973–1974). He got the nickname «Loffe» from his character in the series. This was followed by a hectic career as a television entertainer in the 1970s and 80s, with club shows and films. He became a very popular actor and entertainer, but also quite controversial. His critics claimed he had become something of the uncrowned king of sleazy humour. They were referring in particular to Lasse Åberg’s Repmånad (1979), another major cinema success for him.

Heinz Hopf, who plays Helge, the photographer of young women, was an enigmatic Swedish actor, often cast as a villain. He performed in 44 roles at Dramatiska Teatern in Stockholm. He had stage fright and studied medicine, but never practised. Heinz acted alongside Christina Lindberg in both Exponerad and Thriller – en grym film.

There is an interesting recent review from Red Scream Film Studios that analyses the film:

«1971. This was a strange moment for European cinema. The walls of censorship were collapsing. Nudity was becoming increasingly acceptable. Art cinema had already taught audiences to accept fragmented narratives and sexual openness. Meanwhile, exploitation producers discovered that putting naked women into something vaguely resembling an art film could open doors that ordinary pornography could not. Everybody won. The intellectuals got transgression. The distributors got boobs. And occasionally the collision produced something genuinely strange. Exponerad is one of those films. It never fully commits to being an erotic film, psychological thriller or experimental character study. Instead, it drifts between them, with Christina Lindberg serving as the connective tissue holding the whole strange thing together. Exponerad exists in that wonderfully dubious territory where art cinema and pornography once shared a dirty apartment and occasionally borrowed each other’s clothes. It doesn’t quite work. It doesn’t quite make sense. And I’m not convinced Gustav Wiklund entirely knew what he was doing. But fifty-five years later, we’re still trying to figure out exactly what the hell he made. That counts for something. And Christina Lindberg is still impossible to look away from. Ultimately, it’s Belle de Jour getting lost on the way to a Swedish porn cinema: Christina Lindberg, blackmail, orgies, psychedelic music, sexual anxiety, and 90 minutes spent wondering whether any of this shit actually happened… or whether Lena just closed her eyes and imagined the whole sordid thing.»