ETT ANSTÄNDIGT LIV

In 1967 (with Jan Lindqvist as his co-director), Stefan Jarl made a documentary feature, Dom kallas oss mods (They Call Us Misfits ) which centred on Kenta and Stoffe, two Swedish youths with common background of broken homes, petty delinquencies and reform schools. They belonged to the same gang as Jarl himself. Ett anständigt liv takes up their stories ten years later, during which period marijuana had been replaced by heroin as the fashionable drug among young people in Stockholm. Stoffe, living with a prostitute, is addicted to heroin. Kenta is now married and has a son. He occasionally joins his old friend in drinking bouts, but is more concerned with the welfare of his mother, who is serving five years in jail for killing Kenta's brutish stepfather. On her first leave from prison, he and his wife take her on an excursion to the countryside. Stoffe, despite Kenta's attemps to make him undergo treatment, dies of a collapsed pancreas during the shooting of the film. The third and final part of Jarls Mods-trilogy was to be Det sociala arvet (The social Contract or Misfits to Yuppies), filmed in 1993.