The Girl in a Swing (1988)

Alan Dresland (Rupert Frazer), a dealer in antique ceramics, leads a somewhat boring, placid life. Stuck up in a very British kind of way, he doesn’t really seem to have much of an actual life beyond working upper class “responsibilities”. That changes when he travels to Denmark on business, and finds himself in need of some clerical help fluent in Danish, English and German.

A business friend lends Alan one of his secretaries. Karin Foster (Meg Tilly, with an accent so painful, it actually adds to the inherent weirdness of the character she’s playing) is very beautiful, somewhat reticent, impulsive and exactly the kind of woman Alan is bound to fall in love with, what with her tendency to quote German Romantic poetry and swoon at classical music in a most spellbinding manner while looking like, well, Meg Tilly.

For reasons only known to herself, Karin genuinely reciprocates Alan’s feelings, and after a two week courtship, he proposes marriage, despite the fact that Karin is clearly keeping secrets, telling him nothing of her past. She insists on getting married in England, so she need not produce her friends nor family. She also does not want to get married in a church.

Still, the couple’s early married life is full of fine, if a bit weird, companionship and sex that reaches from good to transcendental, and Karin charms friends and family as much as she did Alan.

From time to time, the shadow of Karin’s undisclosed past rears its ugly head – there’s a recurring motif of drownings, as well as the metaphorical shade of a child.

That latter part will become increasingly intense until it turns into a proper haunting.

There’s a languid quality to Gordon Hessler’s darkly fantastic The Girl in a Swing that isn’t exactly conducive to a solidly paced narrative. But then, I don’t think a solidly paced narrative is something this adaptation of a novel by Richard Adams actually aims for. Rather, much of the film is about creating a specific, allusive as well as elusive, mood, influenced by the (early, despite the Heine quotations) German Romantics, the Greek myths, and a very Greek idea of tragedy. In fact, there’s a properly pagan heart hidden in rather a lot of scenes here that Hessler puts in dialogue with his film’s more Christian elements (again, very much in a way the German Romantics would have understood).

All of this does sound rather fantastic, and is certainly a mood and idea space fantasy/fantastic cinema doesn’t explore all too often, or at all. However, in practice, Hessler isn’t quite good enough of a director – or scriptwriter – to turn a concept into a movie in a consistently effective manner. The languid eroticism can feel pompous and overloaded with symbols in a way I find deeply bourgeois (or really, the German version of bourgeois, bürgerlich), aiming for a depth and complexity of feeling it doesn’t quite manage to reach. As beautiful as all the beautiful shots of Meg Tilly’s (beautiful) face are – and as much effort as she clearly puts into embodying a character that’s purposefully difficult to grasp – that isn’t quite enough to realize the greater ideas about sexuality and repression, guilt and forgiveness, and so on Hessler is aiming for.

Despite these failings, I can’t help but admire the film (and not only Tilly) for trying for this heightened tone, for the classical and Romantic allusions, even for the callousness with which it treats the reveal of the reasons for Karin’s feelings of guilt, for an attempt at resonance with cultural lines movies in 1988 just weren’t thinking along at all.