Director: Jan Troell
Running time: 114 minutes
IF IT was 1970-something, Everlasting Moments would endure as a kind of movie classic because back then, the world seemed to have more patience and curiosity about the simple pleasure of a film ab
out a working-class woman who found solace in photography.
Swedish film director Jan Troell is probably best known for films such as The Emigrants and The New Land which starred Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann and received six Oscar nominations.
Troell's movies are sturdy, steady reflections of daily life that don't load up the screen with metaphysical baggage. At his best, he makes long movies that don't feel long enough.
This time the 77-year-old director has crafted another deceptively small-scale saga about Maria (Maria Heiskanen), a woman whose hardscrabble life includes a hard-drinking, wife-slapping husband Sigge, (Mikael Persbrandt), seven children, and few options. Her husband appears incapable of staying in work long enough to pull his large family out of poverty, due to his tendency to get sidetracked by prodigious philandering, alcohol and belligerence.
After Sigge's political activism leads to him being fired from the dockyards, Maria remembers a camera she won in a lottery and goes to a photographer's studio to sell it. Her bright interest prompts the owner Mr Pedersen (Jesper Christensen) to convince her to use it to earn pin money taking Christmas photos of her neighbours. The art of photography is still in its infancy, and to Maria the alchemy of chemicals into images is something akin to magic. "It's our secret," Pedersen tells her, and for a while it remains their private confidence. What's unsaid is a growing emotional attachment that develops between Maria and the kindly camera shop owner.
Despite a dreadful title and a plot that sounds like something you'd find on Channel 5 in the afternoon, this is not a sentimental, sepia-toned period picture. Everlasting Moments has a very clear vision of its own, and its images are striking and unusual, from the young man who walks out on to a frozen lake and disappears into the fog, to small children crowding against a window trying to glimpse their first dead body. Even the husband emerges as something more than the usual repressive, battering bully. The daughter who narrates the film doesn't understand what keeps her parents together, but the film does. At one point Maria does gather the children and leaves Sigge but when they go to stay with her parents, her father reminds her that marriage is a vow that must be honoured.
There's also a tender scene where Maria bathes her husband, which hints at the ongoing allure that compels Maria to forgive his appalling behaviour.
In many ways this is a prison movie about transcending confinement but the film itself is also a beautiful work of art, exquisitely framed and precisely envisioned. Delicately, Troell tracks a passing century through the terrific true story of Maria's emancipation, a woman who gains focus with her lens.
On general release
