Here are four Swedish experts on the subject of sex to run through the basics for your education. They include a husband and wife team of consultants and a gynaecologist, and they settle down in a sitting room to discuss how to enjoy a healthy sex life. They begin by identifying the main problems, which on the male side of things can be insensitivity towards your partner and a general ignorance of her needs, and on the female side a tendency to denigrate her partner and cast doubt over his prowess. Now that we know where we stand, the experts will guide us through what to do about it.
If the title of this sounds familiar, then it's not because you've heard it in the original Swedish (Ur kärlekens språk, if you must know), but because you have seen Martin Scorsese's classic seventies film Taxi Driver. Cast your mind back to the scene where Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle goes out on the date he's been wishing for all these months, only to completely misjudge the situation by taking her to a porn movie, so that Cybill Shepherd's Betsy gets embarrassed to the extent that she flees the theatre and Travis can wave goodbye to that meaningful relationship he always wanted.
Well, the film that they go to see was this one, and if you've ever wondered how Travis could be so idiotic in his choice of entertainment then one viewing of this might illuminate the thought processes he was going through. For this isn't really a porno movie after all, as while there were plenty of exploitation efforts which noticed they could get away with showing actual sex onscreen if they claimed to be educational, the makers of The Language of Love to all appearances were perfectly sincere in their pursuit of learning. Yes, that learning was sexual, but with its graphics and clinical closeups there's very little erotic about this.
Indeed, it begins to resemble something that should have been shown to students quite early on, and most of the running time is taken up with those four experts having a slightly stagey conversation that goes over the main points of their discussions, occasionally turning to the audience to introduce a piece of footage that illustrates their lessons. You half expect them to inform you that there will be a written test at the end of the film, so make as many notes as you can. Those interludes range from the medical, as we see women have contraceptive devices fitted, to the romantic, where the plusses of having a sexual relationship at the heart of a loving bond are emphasised.
For the first half hour The Language of Love is oddly disturbing, it may be the distance of time between now and then but there's something forbidding about its determinedly matter of fact approach that makes it resemble a documentary designed by robots to teach the humans how to operate under these conditions: women are even given a crash course in masturbation. But as you get used to its studied, anodyne tone the experience grows steadily more boring, so that by the end of it you feel that you've sat through a particularly dry lecture. Perhaps Travis was trying to be helpful in his choice, but if Betsy had stayed to the end she'd have probably been sent to sleep. There were three titles in this series originally, though you'd have to have quite some tolerance for tedium to sit through them all; leave it to the counselors to teach you about actual love. Music, which gets pretty groovy in places, by Mats Olsson.
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