Dziewczęta z Norrtull

The roles of protagonist and narrator are played by a single woman who is exhausted from taking care of her son and not being able to even buy winter clothes with her salary, as well as from her monotonous job as a clerk, where she is harassed by her importunate boss (the mass scenes of urban commotion and the hustle and bustle of the mechanised office are reminiscent of King Vidor’s The Crowd shot five years later). She finds solace in a gang made up of her three female friends. Together they rent an apartment in Stockholm, where they dance, sing, drink beer and organise a strike for more respectable pay... The “chatty” retrospective narrative in first person rather strikingly reveals that the work on which the film is based was a serialised novel (written by Elin Wägner, journalist, writer, feminist and member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences). By placing the characters in various situations and spaces, director Per Lindberg is able to evoke an atmosphere of closeness and solidarity between the women without using intertitles and in other scenes he skilfully depicts the changing power dynamics, which depend on one’s job, gender or class status. Mainly, it is a joy to see a film from almost a century ago that tells a story of relationships in a social context and celebrates the power of sisterhood. 75% (13.02.2021)