THE GUARDIAN ANGEL
With Philip Zanden, Etienne Glaser, Malin Ek, Bjorn Kjellman, Gunilla Roor, and Lena Nylen.
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Jacob is no sooner installed than the purity of his ideological purpose is clouded. He comes close several times to carrying out his intention, but delays the decision. Not meant to sacrifice his own life, and probably unwilling to do so, he watches and waits–and our tension inexorably grows with his, for the Birkmans are no ordinary family and may at any time recognize the scorpion in their midst.
If shared imprisonment draws the family closer, isolation and danger also seem to heighten unfinished family business. Some of this is obscure but manifestly neurotic, leaving Jacob perplexed and anxious. Birkman’s wife, Livia (Malin Ek), on the edge of a nervous breakdown, often seems close to divining Jacob’s objective. Her elder daughter, Jessica (Lena Nylen), also seems on the edge of psychosis, and oscillates between the extremes of complicity with the others and deadly rivalry. Obsessed with the newcomer, she seduces him with the kind of tigerish rapacity one more often associates with rape. Purged, her feelings cool, and their interactions become more those of allies. Scorched by Jessica’s intensity into seeing her father with new eyes, Jacob lapses even further from his original purpose.
The power of The Guardian Angel lies in the fact that none of this is verbalized. The moral dilemmas all emerge from the spectacle of willful characters locked in powerful and unpredictable struggle, some of which remains in a realistic obscurity. The main characters are wonderfully and truthfully complex, but some minor ones are too monolithic–Livia in particular has too little scope for the lengthy screen time she occupies, and as an actress Ek is driven to repeat herself over and over. Sometimes the lack of motivation can seem unnatural–I saw no reason for the sexual relations between Jessica and Jacob to cease as abruptly as they had begun.
Bubbling away in the family crucible is another historically mounting pressure–the right to sexual self-expression. Osten’s honesty is shocking in its very casualness. We witness the sex life of each main character, including that of the aging minister and his wife, who often just lie in nude companionship on their bed. Contrasted with Jessica’s psychotic cravings and Jacob and Katja’s tentative yearnings, their relationship seems peaceful and complete. Nowhere in Osten’s film is there the contrived erotic titillation, the male-oriented fantasies of sex we see elsewhere. Instead, Osten turns her frank gaze on the way sex really works, particularly on how both men and women use it to test their power.
