The era’s most shocking sex film was politically analytical, not merely prurient

Evidence

Closer to Godardian analysis than skin-flick prurience, Sjöman’s film linked his protagonist Lena’s sexual curiosity to her questioning Swedish society. The most notorious scenes were comic episodes in which Lena and her boyfriend make love in public. More explicit and discomfiting was the sequence in which she is treated for the scabies with which her lover presumably infected her. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1412

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did scabies treatment read as more discomfiting than public sex scenes in 1969? Worth chasing — possibly a documentary-realist rupture vs. staged transgression.