The Baby Carriage

Inger Taube

Bo Widerberg's The Baby Carriage, from 1963, is a playful and impressive debut from a director who I'm not sure ever equaled it. The film follows the romantic misadventures of an eighteen year old working girl, Britt (Inger Taube), in Malmö. Britt is bored with her job in a sweat shop and, still living at home with her parents, feels stultified by her domestic situation. She flirts with the drunken Björn (played by Widerberg regular Thommy Berggren), but he is too feckless to keep their planned date. She falls in with a vocalist, Robban (Lars Passgard), whose band plays an excruciating mixture of Chubby Checker and Acker Bilk, and after an evening steaming up the windows of his jalopy, finds herself pregnant. Robban, not ready to be a parent, ghosts Britt, but her condition forces herself to regain focus and become more resourceful. She finds a better job and her own flat.

By chance, she reunites with Björn who wants to court her. He is from a more upper crust background and is eager to tutor Britt to become more culturally aware. She is eager to learn and rise above her class origins. She signals this by filching a chandelier from her parents' flat, a symbol of her strivings. Björn caps his Pygmalion act by gifting Britt a stylish new pair of glasses that she direly needs. However, Björn has serious mommy issues. A revisiting of the primal scene makes apparent the psychosis that lurks in Björn. He responds by lashing out at Britt and then disappears from her life. After her daughter's birth, Britt resolutely adjusts to her trying new life. Robban reappears, eager to see his daughter and restart with Britt. She allows him a tryst, but makes it plain that any future relationship will be occasional and on her on terms. The film ends with Britt pushing the titular pram as reflections of light bathe her face. She has been bloodied by experience, but is heroically unbowed.

Widerberg had been a critic before entering film work and The Baby Carriage has often been described as being influenced by the French New Wave. Surely Widerberg gained impetus by seeing former French critics put there efforts on the screen with shoestring budgets. He thought most Swedish productions were bloated and bragged, at the time, that The Baby Carriage only cost a quarter of the average Swedish film. However, the film reminds me more of the kitchen sink realism of the new English films of that era. A number of those English directors, reacting against the posh legacy of English heritage films, also started as critics: such as Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz. If anything Widerberg and Inger Taube succeed in giving their heroine more agency than the working class protagonist of such Brit films as Georgy Girl, A Taste of Honey or The Leather Boys.

Thommy Berggren

Björn's flip out over his mommy issues is the weakest aspect of the film. Despite Widerberg giving us a few clues that all is not well with his psyche, his breakdown seems more a plot device than a natural development of a character. Thommy Berggren, however, is marvelous, giving the audience enough glimpses of Björn's charm to show us what Britt sees in him. He would go on to be a frequent collaborator with Widerberg, starring in Widerberg's biggest hit, Elvira Madigan. In Widerberg's next film after The Baby Carriage, Raven's End, he would play Widerberg's alter ego in a You Can't Go Home Again type look at Widerberg's youthful background. Ms. Taube is especially memorable in The Baby Carriage, the right mixture of tender and tough, and would appear in Widerberg's 1965 film, Love 65. I also enjoyed Lars Passgard as Robban, he is best known as the yearning adolescent in Bergman's Through A Glass Darkly. The director's daughter Nina makes a memorable debut as the child of Britt's neighbor in this film. She would go on to make a host of vivid impressions in Widerberg films like Raven's End, Love 65, and Elvira Madigan. 

The most impressive aspect of The Baby Carriage is Jan Troell's black and white cinematography. The darks are deep enough to capture the grotty texture of the stairwells and flats in the film. The lights bright enough to highlight the incandescent dreams that Britt still harbors at film's end. Troell would follow Widerberg in the director's chair, but he would usually retain himself as cinematographer of those films. I also enjoyed Jan Johansson's jazz score which matches the rhythmic friskiness of The Baby Carriage. He did scores for such disparate film as Mai Zetterling's Night Games, Bergman's The Touch, and Pippi in the South Seas.