This film is based upon a novel by Richard Adams, the author best known for "Watership Down". It is a long time since I read the book, but watching the film made me realise that I can still remember quite a lot of it. Alan Desland, an English antique dealer specialising in ceramics, meets an attractive German-born secretary, Karin Forster, on a business trip to Copenhagen. The two fall in love and get engaged. Karin travels to England, and they are eventually married. At first Alan is enchanted with his beautiful young wife, but Karin's odd behaviour starts to arouse his concerns and he begins to believe that there may be a darker side to the girl he has married. Alan, who has psychic abilities, begins to experience strange, troubling visions- a green tortoise toy mysteriously appears and disappears, and he hears a child calling or crying when no child is present. Karin herself is subject to sudden mood swings and seems haunted by a sense of guilt. (The title "The Girl in a Swing" refers to a valuable antique porcelain ornament which plays a part in the plot, but might also allude to Karin's emotional volatility).
Roger Ebert called the film "disappointing" but singled out for praise the performance by Meg Tilly as Karin. I would agree with him about the film being disagreement, but I would disagree with him about Tilly, who was much better in "Masquerade", another film from 1988. To begin with Tilly, who is of mixed European and Chinese heritage, seemed miscast as a German, and her attempts at a foreign accent made her dialogue difficult to follow at times. More important, however, is the fact that she was playing a character whom any actress, no matter how talented, would struggle to make either credible or sympathetic.
To explain why I am going to have to write a spoiler, but this is the sort of film which it is impossible to discuss sensibly without spoilers. If the film is flawed, it is because there is a fatal flaw at the heart of its source novel. (It is this flaw which the reason why I have never re-read the book, even though I still have my copy on the bookshelves and even thought I have read "Watershed Down, a longtime favourite, several times in the intervening period).
It turns out that Karin is a murderer, something not revealed until the end of the film. She was an unmarried mother with a little girl who cold-heartedly killed her daughter so as not to jeopardise her relationship with Alan, who had earlier expressed the view that he would have trouble marrying a woman who had a child by another man. The original novel is narrated by Alan in the first person, and in the film the story is also told from his viewpoint, which means that we never see Karin's perspective or learn her motive for her horrific crime, beyond the explanation that she committed it in the belief that by doing she would secure the affections of her new boyfriend. Although he never really explains Karin's crime, Adams nevertheless expects his readers to sympathise with her; his narrator Alan certainly does, even trying to excuse Karin by persuading himself that he himself was somehow partially responsible for the tragedy. When I read the novel, however, I was not convinced at all; it may sometimes be possible to find mitigating factors in a murder case, but not in a case involving the killing of an innocent child by her own mother. The only factor which might extenuate Karin's crime might be serious mental illness, but Adams presents us with no evidence of this.
It might have been possible to have made a better film had the film-makers been prepared to alter the story- if, for example, the girl's death had been made an accident for which Karin was not responsible but about which she nevertheless feels guilty. Whether Adams would have been prepared to permit such a film is another matter, and the film that we actually have follows his plot fairly closely. It therefore shares the novel's great flaw, namely that it tries to extenuate or explain away a repellent child murder. 4/10
A goof. We learn that Alan's home town is in Berkshire and "only about sixty miles from the sea". Nowhere in Berkshire (and only a few places anywhere in England) is so far from the nearest point on the coast.
Roger Ebert called the film "disappointing" but singled out for praise the performance by Meg Tilly as Karin. I would agree with him about the film being disagreement, but I would disagree with him about Tilly, who was much better in "Masquerade", another film from 1988. To begin with Tilly, who is of mixed European and Chinese heritage, seemed miscast as a German, and her attempts at a foreign accent made her dialogue difficult to follow at times. More important, however, is the fact that she was playing a character whom any actress, no matter how talented, would struggle to make either credible or sympathetic.
To explain why I am going to have to write a spoiler, but this is the sort of film which it is impossible to discuss sensibly without spoilers. If the film is flawed, it is because there is a fatal flaw at the heart of its source novel. (It is this flaw which the reason why I have never re-read the book, even though I still have my copy on the bookshelves and even thought I have read "Watershed Down, a longtime favourite, several times in the intervening period).
It turns out that Karin is a murderer, something not revealed until the end of the film. She was an unmarried mother with a little girl who cold-heartedly killed her daughter so as not to jeopardise her relationship with Alan, who had earlier expressed the view that he would have trouble marrying a woman who had a child by another man. The original novel is narrated by Alan in the first person, and in the film the story is also told from his viewpoint, which means that we never see Karin's perspective or learn her motive for her horrific crime, beyond the explanation that she committed it in the belief that by doing she would secure the affections of her new boyfriend. Although he never really explains Karin's crime, Adams nevertheless expects his readers to sympathise with her; his narrator Alan certainly does, even trying to excuse Karin by persuading himself that he himself was somehow partially responsible for the tragedy. When I read the novel, however, I was not convinced at all; it may sometimes be possible to find mitigating factors in a murder case, but not in a case involving the killing of an innocent child by her own mother. The only factor which might extenuate Karin's crime might be serious mental illness, but Adams presents us with no evidence of this.
It might have been possible to have made a better film had the film-makers been prepared to alter the story- if, for example, the girl's death had been made an accident for which Karin was not responsible but about which she nevertheless feels guilty. Whether Adams would have been prepared to permit such a film is another matter, and the film that we actually have follows his plot fairly closely. It therefore shares the novel's great flaw, namely that it tries to extenuate or explain away a repellent child murder. 4/10
A goof. We learn that Alan's home town is in Berkshire and "only about sixty miles from the sea". Nowhere in Berkshire (and only a few places anywhere in England) is so far from the nearest point on the coast.
