Svart Lucia's subtle ambiguities—between sadism and masochism; power and powerlessness; and engagement and distancing—make it one of the most memorable European films of recent years, argues Peter Hutchings.
In 1992, two films appeared which had women writers as their central characters. In the US neo-noir thriller Basic Instinct, Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) is a wealthy crime novelist who might, or might not, be a serial killer. By contrast, Mikaela Holm (Tova Magnusson) in the Swedish psychological thriller Svart Lucia (Black Lucia / The Premonition) is still at school and writes only in her diary and for school compositions, and yet her writings also lead, albeit indirectly, to several deaths. Both these films present the female writer as a troubling figure, for the male characters and to a certain extent for the films themselves. Compared with the brashness of Basic Instinct, however, Svart Lucia emerges as a subtler, more complex and altogether more disturbing treatment of the subject.
"I'm writing this for you alone"
A camera prowls through an apartment at night before approaching Mikaela as she lies sleeping in bed. Mikaela awakens, and the prowling camera is revealed as part of her dream. She gets up and pens an entry in her diary: "I'm writing this for you alone. It's the only thing that means anything. She had always feared him. The fear made her decide. She couldn't resist it." This opening scene sets up ambiguities around Mikaela that the rest of the film will explore, especially regarding her relationship to the sado-masochistic fantasies she writes and which she will eventually present to the teacher who is the focus of those fantasies. To what extent is she the sadist—the prowler in her own dream—and to what extent the masochist, the potential victim?
On one level, this scenario—a pupil's crush on a teacher—is a familiar one. But Svart Lucia develops the scenario in an increasingly perverse manner. Mikaela writes an essay for her teacher in which she expresses some of her S/M fantasies. Later, when spying on the teacher, she becomes aware that he is beginning to act out these fantasies with women he picks up in bars. She writes more explicit stories and sneaks these into the teacher's bag when he is not looking. These too the teacher enacts, leading up to Mikaela's witnessing what appears to be the teacher murdering a woman. "I decided that he would kill her," she says later, her shock and guilt mingling with a sense of her power to manipulate, to make things happen.
In other ways, Mikaela emerges as a helpless, troubled figure. In part, this has to do with her family situation, and particularly the absence of her father. Certainly her attraction to the older teacher might be seen as having some relation to this absence (although the film never allows its oedipal elements to become too schematic). Interestingly in this respect, in what appears to be a flashback scene we glimpse Mikaela's mother attacking a man with a knife while Mikaela looks on. The obvious assumption is that the man is the father (although he does not look much like the father as shown in a photograph at the film's beginning), and the assault is the cause of the father's estrangement from the family. However, the events leading up to the assault are never explained and consequently the scene itself, and the family history it apparently represents, remains one of several unsolved mysteries in the film, unsolved both for the audience and for Mikaela herself.
Another aspect of Mikaela's troubled life is her ability to glimpse future events (hence the film's being retitled The Premonition for its release in English-speaking territories) combined with her inability to recognise the significance of what she sees and hence be able to act upon the information. She finds that she has predicted in exact detail—in diary entries to which only she has access—some of her teacher's behaviour, and, more importantly, she also foresees the death of her friend Joakim (Figge Norling) and can do nothing to save him. Within such a context, Mikaela's written fantasies oscillate between positions of power and powerlessness, signifying her uneasy relationship with the world in which she lives.
Dead cat, dead baby
Mikaela's writings have an effect on others as well. Not just the teacher but also Joakim who reads Mikaela's essay and, apparently, proceeds to murder Sandra (Liv Alsterlund), another school friend. He then kills either his mother or half-sister (or both; the film is not specific on this point). The extent of Joakim's guilt is not clear: he never admits to the killing of Sandra, and the teacher was also present at the party where that murder takes place and could have been responsible for it (the film avoids answering the question of whether the teacher actually killed anyone while being spied on by Mikaela). Equally unclear is the extent to which Joakim's crimes were "caused' by Mikaela's writing. Certainly, the film suggests that Joakim was already deranged—hence his ramblings about his childhood friendship with Mikaela despite her insistence that they did not know each other as children. But did Mikaela's work set him off?
Joakim himself seems uncertain about this. "You never wanted reality—this is reality," he screams accusingly at Mikaela at the film's conclusion, but a few seconds later he tells her "You and I are the same. We want the same thing." This scene can be read in two ways. On the one hand, it represents Mikaela's punishment for her transgressive writing as she is made to see the appalling consequences of her actions. On the other hand, it shows us a male denying Mikaela's creative agency, imposing upon her imaginative fantasy his own literal story of masculine power and murder.
Svart Lucia's conclusion does not resolve this matter in any clear-cut way. Mikaela is left alone on a railway bridge with Joakim's dead body, crushed by a passing train, before her. But earlier in the film Mikaela is distanced from the ultimately self-destructive violence associated with Joakim. Twice she is confronted by scenes of horror, the first when she discovers a cat's mutilated body, the second when she finds a dead baby—stolen from the school's biology department—in her locker. Her reaction is identical in both cases. While others present turn away in shock and disgust, Mikaela does not flinch but instead reaches out to the cat and to the baby. As is so often the case with Mikaela, this is an ambiguous gesture. Does it show a cold curiosity or does it show compassion?
In the end, perhaps, the film does not want to separate these out; it does not distinguish between wanting to know about the world and having some kind of emotional connection with that world. Mikaela's behaviour throughout the film—her voyeurism, her manipulation of others—expresses this tension between distance and intimacy in a manner that is both disturbing and compelling, and it is this ambiguous quality which renders Svart Lucia one of the most memorable (and, it has to be said, unjustly neglected) European films of recent years.
Peter Hutchings
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