EVERLASTING MOMENTS (2008) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Jan Troell
Maria Heiskanen, Mikael Persbrandt,
Jesper Christiansen, Amanda Ooms
This movie drops you right down in early 20th-century Sweden, where a young woman named Maria (Maria Heiskanen) has just won a camera in a lottery and married the man who bought her the ticket. The man, a philandering longshoreman named Sigfrid, is an abusive alcoholic she stoically stays with through thick and thin, binges and beatings, dock strikes and prison terms, crushing poverty and a half-dozen children. And every now and then, she gets out the "Contessa" from the bottom of a drawer or the back of a closet, and shoots a few pictures. It's clear that she has an eye, and in those rare, fleeting moments of creativity, in the darkroom or behind the lens, she visibly comes alive in a way that's denied her in every other aspect of her existence. It's a knowing, evocative look back at a place and time when most people, and especially most women, had few options, none of them real good ones. The movie itself has the look of old photographs, Troell exploring Maria's world the way a photographer would, and Persbrandt in particular has a face straight out of a century-old snapshot. That Maria and Sigfrid don't age much over the 20 hard years the story covers might seem strange at first, till you consider: The faces in those old photographs don't age, either.
