Dear John

I thought there something of the "Brief Encounter" (1945) to this gently simmering tale of love - only this time we are on the water rather than a train. "John" (Jarl Kulle) is the handsome and rakish captain of a small boat who runs a regular shipping route taking him into a small village harbour where he shops in a grocers and regularly encounters a young waitress who has a daughter of her own. Quite swiftly, we can clearly observe that there is a rapport building between the sailor and a girl who identifies herself as "Anita" (Christina Schollin) and that steps up a gear when he takes himself skinny dipping and she takes up residence at the end of the pier - without (?) knowing he's in the water. From this nervous embarrassment comes an invitation from him to take her and "Helena" (Helena Nilsson) to the zoo in Copenhagen and though she is intensely conscious that she cannot just become his woman in another port, so their relationship is prone to quite lively vacillations as their skills at walking on eggshells starts to become compromised by some genuine feelings of affection. As events advance, it looks like if they are to have to any future together, they may well have to leave this town - but is she ready for that and is he ready to commit to a woman who might not have actually told him her real name? Essentially this is a simply structured love story with characters that are empathetically developed with a degree of tempramentality, quirkiness and even the odd dark humour and though I could perhaps have done without the sometimes overly complicated flashbacks, there is something engaging about the straightforwardness of the plot, here. Aside from showcasing the reputational double-standards of behaviour between the sexes, this also leaves us guessing to an extent about just what might happen. This isn't a join-the-dots exercise and at times the skills of both Kulle contrasting his "Jack the Lad" attitude to women with his obviously growing feelings for "Anita" and the remarkably understated but powerful Schollin delivers us chemistries that rather effectively sum up the ebbs and flows of any arrangement subject to that biggest of all pressures - not being free to be free. The supporting assembly also delivers quite potently to craft an atmosphere of compromised claustrophobia and there is something of the lapping tide to the pace of this stylishly photographed film, too.