Secrets of Women / Waiting Women

Four women married to four brothers are spending a holiday in the Stockholm archipelago while they wait for their husbands to return from a business trip. On the last evening, before the men´s train is due to arrive to Stockholm, three of them recall episodes from their past life. Rakel tells of an affair with a lover from childhood days that led to her husband´s threatening to commit suicide in the garden shed. Märta recounts her student days in Paris, her romance with a Bohemian artist, Martin, and the details of a pre-marital confinement. Karin, the oldest of the three women, describes a farcical incident after a party, when she and her husband Fredrik were trapped in a lift. The fourth woman in the party declines to tell a story, and the fifth and youngest, Maj, elopes with her boyfriend just as the men return at dusk.