I Am Curious (Yellow) broke through the censors in 1969 even though Lena, the lead character, kissed a man’s penis on screen.

Now that I’ve got your attention, I want you to erase that statement from your head.

There is some nudity in the I Am Curious movies, and it is sexualized. But, I Am Curious was doing a bait-and-switch. Come see the naked people, but you have to watch a socialist dissection of 1960s Swedish culture first.

Which isn’t to say that the censorship trials isn’t important. It is. But, the film isn’t about sex for titillation’s sake. I can’t avoid talking about sex and free love because those are principles discussed throughout the I Am Curious films. But, I have to somehow steer the conversation away from that.

Even the Criterion box set seemed especially focused on sex and titillation in their I Am Curious box set. They have an article about sex and politics, and an interview that seems especially focused on how much sex was in I Am Curious. But, it misses the point of the movie.

I Am Curious, released in 1967 (1969 in America) was about dissecting Sweden for its political behaviors, and especially seemed focused on calling bullshit on their “Social Democratic” party, the “liberal” party. But, I Am Curious also explored how the political was reflected in the social.

There’s a problem. I Am Curious was released as two films – Yellow and Blue – meant to be the same story but with completely different footage. The main problem is that I Am Curious was originally a single 3.5 hour movie, and was chopped up into 2 films. Rather than bisecting the film, the two films pull segments from the beginning, middle, and end of the original film. Yellow, being the first released of the two, is 2:01, and features a significantly more complete story than Blue, which feels a bit like David Lynch’s The Missing Pieces.

Vilgot Sjöman, director of I Am Curious, still claims that the movie should be in 2 parts, laid on top of each other, but I think it would be fascinating if it was put back together as a single film.

The thing with I Am Curious is that it’s a movie inspired by the French New Wave, and by the Italians, specifically Fellini. Vilgot mixes documentary with interviews with fiction with making-of to create a hyperreality. The film is about Lena, who hooks up with Vilgot in drama school in order to make a movie with Börje. But she hooks up with Börje in front of the camera, and behind the camera, and the whole thing becomes complicated. In the meantime, Lena the movie character is trying to explore the political situations of 1960s Sweden.

If this all sounds rather trite, it’s because it kind of is. And, yet, paradoxically, it’s not.

When I Am Curious (Yellow) was released in 1969, the critics and audience were expecting something dirty and perverse. It had survived the censorship board, but it still had to fight it. It must be perverse.

When it wasn’t as dirty as expected, the audiences dismissed it, and heaped much of their vitriol on Lena and Lena’s body, proving just how much of the point they missed. Much of Yellow focuses on Women’s Lib issues, and Blue hammers it home.

At one point in Yellow, Lena confesses her body issues to Börje, saying she worries she’s fat and that her breasts don’t look right. Later in the film, Börje throws it right back in her face, saying he doesn’t want her body in his MG before he drives away. It’s meant to be an astoundingly cruel moment accentuating the misogyny of the era. When Roger Ebert wrote in his review, “Beyond that, there’s also a pudgy girl with an unpleasant laugh (she thinks she’s so cute). And a boy who looks like Archie rolled into Jughead.” you could tell he missed that whole segment.

One of the aspects of I Am Curious is how sexual politics are intrinsically tied to class politics. In Blue, an architect who makes 150,000 crowns a year states, “We always come back to difference and distinction.” This was after interview sections with textile workers who make 18,000 crowns for backbreaking work. And, it also comes after a man states that he thinks it is ok for women to earn less than men, for which Lena gives him a mark on a board tallying whether the contempt for women was open or secret.

Lena and the film make statements about everything radical, from Franco’s anti-communist dictatorship of Spain to America’s presence in Vietnam to class warfare to prison to welfare to taxes to church and state. The motto for this movie could have been “Everything Matters.”

As detailed in I Am Curious, the issues plaguing 1960s Sweden seem like the issues plaguing modern day America, but on a much more minor scale. The more things change, etc. Saying that Social Democrats are really conservatives, and the Labor movement is practically fascist. Wondering how we get from here to there. Exploring the idea of nonviolence, and then wondering about its futility.

At one point, Börje violently assaults Lena and rapes her after she found out about a third girlfriend he had that he didn’t tell her about. Her violent revenge fantasies causes her to question Martin Luther King’s theory of non-violence. But, the parallel I Am Curious is asking is whether nonviolence is an acceptable form of protest if violence will be successfully used to disrupt it, and things go on as they were.

The parallels to Occupy’s nonviolent movement, and the violence which was used to disrupt it, seems appropriate to mention. The question becomes whether we want to hold ourselves to a high standard, or whether we want to be successful, and if we have what it takes.

Even though most critics were lambasting the film for being pretentious, a bore, not delivering on the goods, or just on Lena herself, the questions that I Am Curious raises in between the shock were generally ignored. The one who recognized its merit back in the day was Norman Mailer. I suspect the reason I Am Curious would appeal to Mailer who recognized the power of the outsider, and who desired a method to responsibly get in touch with humanity.

If I Am Curious is espousing anything, it’s responsibility. Men should be less assholes. Women can’t, however, expect men to be not assholes. Conservatives shouldn’t be jerks. Liberals should be more liberal. But, radicals can’t sit on their ass trusting things will change without participation. Sex is fun and free, but it’s everybody’s responsibility to make sure it’s done safely and without unwanted pregnancies. Overpopulation exists, and we need to be responsible for it. Class society exists, but should it? How do we dance and fuck (read: exist) without giving up our freedom or crushing other people in the process?

I Am Curious gives the answer in three words it repeatedly flashes over and over: Fraternization, Non-Cooperation, and Sabotage.

But, are these the answers?