Review of SOPOR (1981)
Seen in 2022.
Children take the Swedish royal family hostage to raise awareness of a sense of not being needed.
As in any Hasseåtage, there are scattered good ideas and good actors enjoying themselves in a spot of camp and physical comedy. This one is unusually self-congratulatory. Allan Edwall’s near-silent role as Thorbjörn Fälldin is especially funny, and the silvery shoestring-budget stormtroopers look good. The many jibes at Olof Palme for the 1980 referendum on nuclear power are also very funny, but irrational. The more central message of the film, that everyone contributes to a democracy, has the weight of the enormous effort it must have taken to wrangle all those kids on set to deliver it, but it folds Player Piano (1952) into contemporary parenting advice so freely that it’s still incoherent.