En recension av filmen ”Flickan, Mamman och Demonerna” skriven av Etzel Cardeña.
The song “Padam, Padam,” made famous by Édith Piaf, is played as a leitmotif throughout
the extraordinary new film The Girl, the Mother and the Demons, by the Swedish theatre
and film director Suzanne Osten. The song expresses the Francophile attitude of the mother
character in the film, based on Osten’s own mother, but it also reveals much in its about-to-spin-out-of-control refrain, which include the sentence “One day this tune will drive me
mad,” although the song, of course, did not cause Gerd Osten’s paranoid schizophrenia. In
an earlier film (Mamma, 1982), based on her mother’s diary, Suzanne Osten showed us the
struggles of her unconventional mother in very conventional middle-of-the-century Sweden:
a film critic who saw her ambition to direct an experimental film thwarted by a commercial,
male-dominated film industry; a bohemian who chose her memories of a one-night stand
with a French man in a train over her conventional marriage to a toolmaker; a person in
emotional turmoil in the midst of a continent in bellic turmoil.