As an actress who turned her back on international stardom to direct several feminist features (Loving Couples, The Girls, and Night Games), each in its way a bold dissection of sexual hypocrisy, Mai Zetterling has had something of an empathetic relationship with the Swedish writer Agnes von Krusentjärna (1894-1940). Von Krusentjärna was a noblewoman who began writing romances and graduated to erotic novels that were filled with acrid portraits of family life among the waning gentry. Zetterling's Loving Couples was based on a series of von Krusentjärna novels. Amorosa is a portrait of von Krusentjärna herself, an artist whose life was at least as intriguing as those she invented. Breaking with her family and surroundings, von Krusentjärna met and married a would-be writer and respected translator, David Sprengel. A collector of erotica and of sexual experience, he became Agnes' partner and Svengali-encouraging her in her gutsy writings on women and love, then inserting his own politics and unending fascination with sexual perversity into her writing. Their output was prodigious, but success was not something that the troubled von Krusentjärna would enjoy. As Sylvia Paskin writes in Britain's Monthly Film Journal, "Agnes is frighteningly dislocated from her very first appearance.... Her relationships with other people constantly invite betrayal.... In two superb central performances, Erland Josephson as a fish-eyed erotomaniac, alternately abject and abrasive, is a marvelous foil to Stina Ekblad, who brings a sinewy, wilful grace to her portrayal of tortured and torturing genius."