It was the votes in the Swedish parliament, by party, for and against the Defense Policy bill.

Part of the story in the films involved sending in their attractive, partially undressed model/journalist to interview politicians and man-in-the-street types about various high or low political matters, including the defense policy.

The one I remembered from seeing Yellow in the 60s, and exaggerated into remembering as the overall pattern of the movie, was her asking people what their task was in the official occupation-sabotage policy. The idea is, if you’re officially a neutral country and maybe spout pacifist ideals, without building up a big armed forces what can you do to discourage some (unnamed) big bear-like neighboring country from marching in and taking you over. Answer: develop a plan for civilian industrial sabotage, so that your manufacturing base will be useless to the invader.

So this guy being interviewed, for instance, was assigned to remove some controller gear from his plant’s assembly line and bury it in his sister-in-law’s garden. (This would be the serious political/sociological content needed to “redeem” the work from being merely salacious.)

I incorrectly remembered the movie as being a series of more or less this same interview, an impression corrected only when I found it on DVD in the 90s and watched both versions. It’s actually a pretty well-done example of “nouvelle vague” tendencies moving outside France and rather interesting.

I sometimes get impatient with “DVD Extras” and particularly the chatty version of flmmakers’ commentary tracks. So I value the ones that have an unusual take on how to do it or seem well thought out. (Like David Mamet on the DVD of “The Winslow Boy” stopping the recording at one point near the end so he could go look up a poem he wanted to read us. That was good, but his other DVDs have the usual sort of “cast and crew sitting around reminiscing” commentary track.) Anyway, I thought “I am Curious” did it well — instead of a long continuous commentary, it was set up to jump to selected scenes only; so we did get, say, costume designer remarks, but didn’t need to sit thru four hours of it, there would be just one or two scenes selected for that.

I also thought I remembered that after this particular bury-the-controller-gear interview, they went to her place and did it under the dining-room table; but that must be some other non-Bergman 60s Swedish movie that made a splash in the U.S. (Does “Loves of A Blonde” have an under-the-table sex scene?)

JA-röster NEJ-röster

Högern 3 56
Folkpartiet 50 19
Centern 15 38
Socialdem. 119 73
Kommunisterna 9 1
___ ___
196 187

(We’ll see how badly the formatting gets mangled..)