Cinema: By Northern Lights

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Most films from Sweden are either saturated with sex or infatuated with Ingmar Bergman, or both. In two mettlesome new movies, a pair of little-known Swedish directors make no effort whatever to change the subject, which is still man-woman-mattress, but they owe little more to Bergman than full-bodied performances by several of his favorite actors. Both films display a strong personal style, evidence that Sweden's movie industry may be thriving on an infusion of warm blood.

Dear John is a tour de force of erotic realism by Director Lars Magnus Lindgren, 43. During a leisurely opening sequence, the film anchors itself in a bed occupied by a robust seafaring man and a young woman. The subsequent plot explains how they got there, using a free flashback technique that skips from his mind to hers, pausing at a remembered word or gesture, occasionally repeating a significant moment several times over.

As captain of a coastal freighter, John (Jarl Kulle) has docked at a Swedish port to pick up a cargo of sand. With two long evenings to kill ashore, he watches his young crewman charging off in pursuit of pleasure and decides to try his own luck with a cafe waitress (Christina Schollin). The girl, Anita, mother of a child born out of wedlock, remembers him only as a drunken lout who was rude to her on another visit two years earlier. Warily she declines his first invitation, and he smugly vows he'll have her; on the second evening he does. In the process, Director Lindgren sketches a tender, funny and lusty nature study of a love match about to bloom, slowly taking root in an attraction that turns out to be considerably more than sin-deep.

The long day's courtship moves from the beach to an impromptu airplane excursion to the Copenhagen zoo, then home and bed, but not before the would-be seducer confides: "Every time you reach a port, you think you'll find what you want. By the time you leave a place, you're sick of it." Lindgren's camera dotes on closeups, catching every glimmer of doubt, every stab of loneliness, until the whole film tingles with a heady sense of discovery. Finally, it sees through the girl's eyes that the hot-blooded mariner is actually a gentle, restless wanderer, then through his eyes that the acquiescent hash slinger is a woman made beautiful by extraordinary warmth and spontaneity.

Morally and structurally free-spirited, the film unequivocally puts the cart before the horse in showing that sex can precede love. Director Lindgren bends a few other rules too. Having analyzed to perfection the urgent biochemistry between a man on the make and a girl who probably won't say no, he follows it with a session of post-lovemaking banter that seems about as explicit as the law allows, at least for the moment.

Loving Couples. This antimarriage, antisex comedy is a woman's picture with a baleful twist: it hates men. Couples has nothing in common with the joyously sexy Dear John except the liberal use of flashbacks and happy restraint in the use of music. For the most part, both films set the mood of a scene naturally, letting the sea or human sounds or silence speak without interruptions by a redundant orchestra.