To anatomize domestic dysfunctionality, is there?
I mean, where would Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf be without Strindberg’s Dance of Death?
But Hasse Ekman’s 1948 film The Banquet, which I saw yesterday evening at the Museum of Modern Art, doubles down on perversity and adds a significant dose of macro, societal implication. It’s way more raw than anything Hollywood could have permitted itself at the time. Ekman also acts in it, superbly. His father was a great stage and screen star.
MOMA has been running a series on Ekman, “The Other Swede in the Room,” so named because Ekman’s reputation has been somewhat eclipsed by contemporary Ingmar Bergman. I’d never seen anything by Ekman before, and I didn’t know anything about him. He made all sorts of films, not all of them dark by any means.
The MOMA series runs through tomorrow–make a point of it!