I Am Curious: Yellow

I'm having a problem getting into Vilgot Sjoman's I Am Curious: Yellow. It's the film that inspired thousands of hours of Congressional debate in this country over the so-called "obscenity" of the sex scenes. Speaking forty years in the future sure gives me some hindsight, certainly, but an hour in the movie, there's only been one sex scene, scandalous only in that Lena Nyman appears completely naked on camera. To be sure, I didn't rent Yellow to be titillated, but instead to see this document of the emerging consciousness of sexual ethics, but I haven't found anything particularly shocking as of yet. I was very interested in the beginning, in the meta-fictional story of Sjoman and Nyman's love affair, but that was so abruptly dropped that I am wondering what happened. Sure, the film is stream-of-consciousness in a cinematic form, but that doesn't mean I'm not bored by the progression. The film wants to be so many things: comment on Swedish society (more than anything), radical feminist fable, meta-fictional take on making movies, but, halfway into the movie, I don't feel that it accomplishes much of that. I'm only, as I said, an hour into the movie, so I could be totally off-base (and will write more as to whether I am or not), but I'm not loving this movie so far. The high point is Lena Nyman, who is fifty years ahead of her time, still ahead of us in fashion and politics, really. She's a great actress and really quite foxy. So advise me, please! Do you recommend I Am Curious: Blue, seeing what I've said about Yellow? Will it illuminate things, or only bore me further?

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