Inga (Christina Lindberg) is a Swedish sixteen-year-old whose sister Greta (Monica Ekman) lives far away in the big city with her boyfriend Casten (Krister Ekman), and Inga would very much like to see her again since life in the country is less than exciting. But maybe she is more conservative than she would like to see herself, as she discovers when Greta writes her a letter inviting her sister over to visit: she can see the sights, relax, get away from school, it'll be great. She is certainly looking forward to the trip as she gets on the train, and the long journey there gives her a lot of time to ruminate, so by the time she gets off the carriage and meets Greta and Carsten, she is ready for anything...
Maid in Sweden was an American-funded movie made by Cannon, who would by the next decade be littering cinemas with a go for broke plethora of productions which sure enough saw them out of business by the end of that era. But go back a bit, and they were investing in sexploitation such as this, which most will recall, if they recall it at all, for the English language debut of Swedish starlet Christina Lindberg, she of the willingness to doff her togs at the drop of a hat for the camera, one of many seventies performers who gathered a cult following for precisely that reason. She had a couple of films released before this, but it was here she made her initial impact with moviegoers.
Male moviegoers, most likely, but in this case the results came across as a parody of what outsiders would regard to be a Swedish drama, lots of introspection and nudity, though this was far from another I Am Curious Yellow as the philosophical musing was none too well developed. However, if you're the sort of film buff who will watch a movie with an actress you're partial to and continually lament every time something bad happens to her character and feel very protective as a result, then you will be hissing "Leave her alone, you beast!" to the unpleasant males who appeared alongside Christina in Maid in Sweden since even in her dreams she has visions of being attacked or otherwise repressed.
In fact, the film's attitude towards Inga is somewhat conflicted, as it cannot make up its mind whether she is victim or in control. When Carsten early on tries to have a conversation with her he doesn't get much that's illuminating, making her out to be rather boring, and we may be of the same opinion, but Lindberg always had a curiously soulful way about her that spoke of acres of Scandinavian melancholy, thereby bringing out that aformentioned protective feeling, and this film wasn't featuring even the worst her personas would have to put up with. Not least because of her too-thick Swedish accent, she ended up dubbed with what sounds like a voiceover artist over twice her age (Christina was eighteen) adopting a cod-Swedish accent to deliver her lines for her.
But more serious is what happens when Greta arranges for her sister to go out on a date with an older artist, Bjorn (Leif Naeslund). We've already seen Inga has a sexual side when she accidentally spied on Greta and Carsten making love and she retired to her room to masturbate the night away, but that doesn't prepare you for what the filmmakers thought was acceptable when Bjorn asks her back to his place. Quite what a man in his twenties thinks is a good idea about going out with a sixteen-year-old is not made clear, but in a cliché of seventies softcore that thankfully we have left behind more or less, Bjorn grows quickly impatient with the girl's coyness and basically rapes her. Instead of traumatising Inga, she eventually responds and seems grateful for being brought out of her shell, but from a modern perspective this ruins the whole shoddy movie - how can we be comfortable watching the resulting romance when we've seen what the unlovely Bjorn is capable of? If you were here for the nudity you'd doubtless be satisfied, but dramatically this was severely misjudged. CSN-esque music by Bob Nash.
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