Secrets of Women

The four wives of four brothers share stories of their marriages as they each wait for their husbands in a small, secluded cottage. Rakel, Marta, Karin and Annette are each married to one of four brothers. While waiting in a summer cottage for their husbands to come home, they tell each other stories about their marriages. Rakel tells about the time she had an affair and confronted her husband with it. Marta's story is about how she at first refused to marry and had her child by herself. Karin tells about what happened when, one time, she and her husband got stuck in an elevator together. While the women tell their stories, Marta's younger sister Maj is planning to elope. —Leon Wolters <wolters@strw.LeidenUniv.nl> After putting their young children to bed at the end of the evening, sisters-in-law Annette, Karin, Rakel and Marta - married to the Lobelius brothers, respectively Paul, Fredrik, Eugen and Martin, who all work in the family's lucrative international business - and Marta's seventeen-year-old sister Maj are sitting around a table having coffee at the Lobelius family island summer house. They are waiting for the imminent arrival of the husbands and for Maj's boyfriend, Paul and Annette's son, Henrik, at the house where the collective will spend a few days of vacation and where the women and children have been now for a few weeks. Maj's assumption that the four marriages are all standard and boring leads to a confession by Annette of her far-from-perfect marriage to Paul. That confession leads to Annette's three sisters-in-law making their own confessions, which in each case is of consequence to the marriage: Rakel's in relation to an incident with their childhood friend from the island, Kaj; Marta's surrounding the conception and birth of her first child; and Karin's about a predicament she and the usually controlling Fredrik got into and what happened while they waited to get saved. These stories further cement Maj's thoughts of what she sees as her and Henrik's future. —Huggo