Johan (1921)
Directed by Mauritz Stiller

Film Review

Adapted from Finnish author Juhani Aho's novel Juha (1911), Johan is the most recognisably Swedish of the films made by Mauritz Stiller during his time at Sweden's leading film company, Svenska Biografteatern.  Victor Sjöström's The Outlaw and His Wife (1918) served as a kind of template for much of Svenska's subsequent output, realist melodramas in which the natural locations were fully integrated with the plot, and even became an active participant in the drama.  In his previous film Sir Arne's Treasure (1919), Stiller showed how the setting could become a dynamic part of the film, driving the narrative and defining the protagonists, rather than just acting as a passive backdrop.  With its pastoral Scandinavian setting, Johan has somewhat less visual impact but Stiller still uses the location effectively to give dramatic power to a comparatively anodyne tale in which a hormonal maiden allows herself to lured from her grumpy husband by a good-for-nothing womaniser.

Coming straight after Sir Arne's Treasure (1919) and Erotikon (1920), two of Stiller's most highly regarded films, Johan feels like a lesser work, a perhaps too self-conscious attempt by the director to imitate Sjöström.  Stiller's use of location is strikingly similar to Sjöström's, although his more austere approach gives it a subtly different feel.  The subdued naturalistic performances and Stiller's aversion to emotionality endow the film with a powerful, almost brutal realism, of the kind that is hard to find outside Swedish cinema in this period.  The film's dramatic highpoint is the spectacular sequence in which the film's heroine and her ill-chosen lover ride down the rapids, terror and exhilaration melded together in a way that presages the famous sequence in Stiller's later Saga of Gosta Berling (1924), where Greta Garbo escapes with her lover across a frozen lake, pursued by wolves.  Had Sjöström directed it, Johan would probably have had more in the way of lyricism and humanity, but Stiller's genius for visual storytelling is enough to make this a gripping and moving human drama.

Film Synopsis

Johan, a surly middle-aged woodcutter, decides to marry a young orphan girl, Marit, against the wishes of his domineering mother.  If Marit agrees to become Johan's wife, it is more out of duty than love, and it isn't long before her attentions are drawn to an attractive stranger, a young man who does seasonal work in the area.  Marit is easily persuaded by the stranger to leave her husband and start a new life with him.  Convinced that his wife has been abducted, Johan hurries after her.  He can hardly believe his ears when he learns that Marit left him of her own accord...