Vilgot Sjöman

(On Cable TV, January 2022) It’s amazing how pop culture can fixate on small yet distinctive things. For people of a certain age, there are traces of I am Curious — Yellow scattered all across jokey references from The Simpsons to Mad Men. The film itself, after a brief flurry of interest in the late 1960s, was forgotten, whereas later combination of “curious” and “yellow” could be used for a cheap laugh. Seeing the film itself make a short appearance in Quentin Tarantino’s self-novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood reminded me that there was a movie to watch there, and having TCM oblige by showing the film uncut and unabridged helped satisfy my curiosity. What gets forgotten fifty-five years later is that, by the standards of 1960s movie distribution, this was a filthy, filthy art-house import. Coming from Sweden, where it pushed even the loose Scandinavian decency standards, the film has more nudity by itself than decades of cumulative Hollywood film until then. It became a reference because it was quasi-pornography at a time when audiences were eager but not used to it, and that should explain why it left such a reverberating (if dwindling) mark in corners of American culture. The film itself is certainly arthouse — a blurry narrative talking about an affair between a young promiscuous woman and her 24^th partner (she documents them) with more casual nudity than even the trashiest of 1980s sex comedies. Not that it is a comedy — Writer-director Vilgot Sjöman does get a few laughs here as he increasingly blurs the barrier between documentary, fiction and metafiction but the film has bewildering moments of documentary cinema-vérité (including a startling apparition by Martin Luther King, Jr. himself), languorous digressions, an intense argument between two nude lovers and a shift from fiction to fiction-about-fiction that’s as wild as anything else. Half of I Am Curious — Yellow is boring, but the other half still has the power to surprise and puzzle. (It’s apparently a companion piece to I Am Curious — Blue, but that one never gets punny pop-culture references.)  I am convinced that more references have been made to I am Curious — Yellow than people have seen it, so it’s something of a revelation to open up the much-referenced title and find what’s in there.