Amorosa

Mai Zetterling’s Loving Couples was based on a series of novels by the Swedish feminist writer Agnes von Krusenstjerna. Amorosa is a portrait of Krusenstjerna herself, an artist whose life was at least as intriguing as those she invented. Breaking with her family and surroundings, Krusenstjerna met and married a would-be writer and respected translator, David Sprengel. A collector of erotica and sexual experience, he became her 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 Krusenstjerna would enjoy.