Swedish film, filmed in 80s, plot in the 19 century, girl in red dress
A Swedish film, I think it’s called The Red Dress, probably filmed in the 80s, the plot probably takes place in the 18th century, it mainly describes life on a manor farm. The point is perhaps to describe the decline of such a way of life.
The main characters of the film are a lord, his wife and a young girl dressed in a red dress. The girl is from a poor family. That red dress is the only valuable thing she has, a seamstress adjusted it to her size. She dresses in it and goes to a fair in the hope of finding a job. At the fair she meets a lord, who is usually generous and wasteful and when he met her he invited her to come work on his farm and immediately gave her a valuable coin (shilling?). His wife is also at the fair (she is older than him, they have no children) and she then asks him why he gave that girl so much money. The girl comes to the estate and does all the work there, over time she falls in love with the lord and becomes pregnant and eventually gives birth to a child, no one except the two of them knows whose child it is, although of course there are rumors. There is another worker on the estate who has been sympathetic or in love with the girl for a long time and constantly invites her to start a life together and leave the estate, but when he sees that she does not accept this, he leaves the estate disappointed. The lord’s wife eventually falls ill and before her death tells the girl to take care of him because he trusts her.
However, he meets another woman, a lady named Lily, and brings her to the estate, but she is extremely wasteful and because of this the estate begins to deteriorate, not only that she clearly does not love him and begins to cheat on him with a riding teacher, she often humiliates or mocks him, he is already old by then, he begins to deteriorate both mentally and physically.
In the end, Lily leaves him with that riding instructor, the management of the estate is taken over by an employee of the estate who is not a good person, only looks out for his own benefit and ruins the estate with bad business decisions. In the end, the lord has to leave the estate and the girl who has been living in a house for some time takes care of him. In the final scene, she shows him the red dress from the beginning of the film, he has already mentally deteriorated quite a bit, he says the name Lily which she did not like, in the end she throws the red dress into the oven.
The film also describes the girl’s brother, who was a weirdo, lived extremely stingy, but towards the end of his life he suddenly changed, started spending money, bought an expensive suit, dressed and behaved like a gentleman and claimed to be the son of a nobleman, before his death he asked that nobleman to come and recognize him as his son, the nobleman did come and see him but could not recognize him as his son, it remains unclear whether he did not want to do so or he simply did not know about it.