Very well executed

Boring

A Brilliant Conflict

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

'Exponerad' (= Swedish for 'Exposed') above all evokes the mood of the early 1970-s. Complete with the then current idealistic touch about 'free love', for which Sweden was famous at the time (AIDS wasn't there yet).Add to this the picturing of some nice Swedish countryside scenery, all bedded in a credible down-to-earth story.Supported by a number of nudity shots, female lead Christina Lindberg performs your girl-next-door reasonably well. She convincingly manages to carry this film to its end.Those around in the early Seventies will surely warm up watching 'Exponerad'. For those who weren't, I guess this film must be pretty mediocre.

17-year-old Lena (Christine Lindberg) is prone to flights of fancy, most of which involve her being sexually abused or killed. Torn between two lovers, boyfriend Jan and hedonistic pig Helge (who is blackmailing her with naked photos), Lena decides to run away, but after a few days on the road, during which she imagines herself raped, murdered and killed in a car crash, she returns home to confront her problems, all of which might only be inside her head anyway.The subtitles for my copy of Exponerad lagged a couple of minutes behind the film, meaning that I found matters really hard to follow—not that I care that much, because the story was dreadfully dull from what I could gather and isn't what drew me to the film in the first place. No, I sought this one out for the same reason that I imagine most men do: the presence of beautiful exploitation sexpot Lindberg, who being a liberal-minded Swede in the early 70s, frequently disrobes and indulges in soft-core hanky-panky for the pleasure of the viewer.Apart from the regular nudity from the star, there isn't much else to recommend about Exponerad: Lena's violent daydreams are fairly jarring I suppose, and certainly make the viewer wonder what the hell is going, as does a trip to the cinema in which we are treated to several minutes of a Johnny Weismuller Tarzan classic, but everything pales in comparison to the other Lindberg films I have seen so far (my other Lindberg viewings being revenge flick Thriller: A Cruel picture and pinku Journey To Japan).Without Christina, this would probably only be a 3/10 tops; with her, It's got to be worth a 5.

Exposed (1971) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Christina Lindberg fans can rejoice because another one of her films has been released to DVD. In this film she plays a 17-year-old girl who gets taken advantage of by an older man. He took some nude photos of her and is now blackmailing her, which doesn't sit well with a mama's boy that she's currently dating. There are about two other plot lines that could be brought up but, as the director states in the featurette, the story really isn't that important when you've got the beautiful Lindberg running around nude for 60% of the running time. The movie actually manages to be more than just your typical sexploitation film because the story itself isn't too bad and we get some decent performances. The entire subplot of Lindberg's character imagining bad things happening to her might have been a homage to Bunuel's BELLE DE JOUR but it works. These fantasy sequences range from her being raped, to her death with some nudist and various others. Lindberg turns in a good, if certainly not great performance, which is more than enough. She certainly makes us care for her character even though we really don't learn too much about her. The biggest issue with this film and many other sexploitation movies is that there's just not enough going on for a running time over seventy-five minutes. Clocking in at 91-minutes this film runs out of steam towards the final half-hour and there's just way too much added stuff. There's a five-minute sequence, which shows us the movie TARZAN TRIUMPHS but it's not just a clip but an entire five-minute sequence! The print has the Swedish subtitles as well, which was strange to see and I'm curious if Warner knows about it. There are other sequences that could have used some editing as well. With that said, most people are coming to this film to see Lindberg and you get plenty to look out, which is good enough for the film to work.

Lena, a nubile young lass, has been seeing an older man behind the back of her young boyfriend Jan. When she tells Jan, he rewards her with a good few smacks around the chops and she flees town. Lena hitches a lift with with a middle-aged businessman, who parks down a side road and rapes her. But this turns out to be an idle fantasy of Lenas, and when the man drops her off she is picked up by a male/female couple of swingers who she takes to her boyfriend's mother's cabin in the woods. The three of them share an idyll there, broken only by another fantasy of Lena's that the woman is murderously jealous of her, and late at night she watches them making love on the living room floor.The next day Jan appears and, after a car chase (which ends with a fantasy from Lena of she & the couple burning to death), Jan drags his errant girlfriend back to the town. There she confesses that the older man, Helge, has been blackmailing her into taking part in orgies because he has some nudie pictures of her. Helge is violent and obsessed with Lena, and the middle section of the film is split between the girl getting lovey-dovey with Jan and being stalked by the menacing Helge. Eventually Lena runs away from Jan when his mother discovers the nudie shots (calling her a whore) & is followed home by the stalking Helge. He gets into the house and, in a particularly creepy and uncomfortable scene, ties her to the bed (with her collusion), cuts off her dress and has sex with her. She gets an arm free and uses the knife to stab her lover/assailant in the back. There follows an extraordinary shot in which she remains tied up (by both hands) with his stabbed corpse lying on top of her. The next day, Lena's mother arrives back from holiday. Helge has gone and Lena is taken shopping for a new dress. She meets Jan and all seems okay, but for the fact that Lena is still thinking about seeing Helge. There is some question by now as to whether Helge actually exists or whether he's another fantasy of Lena's.Exposed is intriguing because it suggests that Lena's sexuality is a complex and messy state of affairs, and that there is no longer the surety that she would prefer to be in a "normal" relationship with a bland ordinary bloke - perhaps her sexual life runs to more exotic and dangerous pursuits? Or perhaps Helge is a fantasy of the predatory male gaze which will always follow her, thinking about coercion, submission and violence? There's no ground for the definite to exist in Lena's life, torn as she is between a bland reality and a sadistic world of fantasy which is itself potentially true.Lena's story takes place in nicely furnished but faceless rooms (sometimes when Lena is alone in her bedroom, the visuals are reminiscent of Munch) or what Deleuze would call "any-space-whatevers": shopping precincts, streets, petrol stations and stairwells. This is a world which is meaningless but for a series of impulses, be they normalising or sexually deviant. Lena has no definite self, she is a series of reactions or acquiescences to the desires of the men in her life, which might or might not be her desires. In the end, though a lot of flesh has been exposed in the film, the self is as opaque as it was before any camera was pointed at it.Christina Lindberg's affectless face has rarely been better used than in the role of the nullity, Lena. The character confesses that "I feel too little and know too much" and in the world of experience that the film exposes, Lena is not alone in her lack of feeling: as she and her mother walk as typical consumers along the commercial streets of the town, they pass a sex-shop district with windows displaying the same kind of pictures that Lena might have posed for; she asks her mother what she thinks of them, and the mother replies "soon everything will be like that; nobody will feel anything any more." In its modest way, Exposed is a prophecy of a world which was, as the sexual revolution ended, just being born: a world of impulse and craving, the vain search for satisfaction, boring conformism or soulless promiscuity and kicks.Scored with a haunting, harmonica-led theme tune and filmed in stark realist colours, Exposed deserves to have a higher reputation.