Dir. Jan Troell, Sweden, 2008, 110 mins
Cast:
Maria Heiskanen, Mikael Persbrandt, Jesper Christensen
Review by Mike Bartlett
Swedish veteran Jan Troell's latest is exactly what you'd expect of a Best Foreign Film Oscar nominee. Firstly, it's got a “heartwarming” narrative of triumph in the face of adversity, all based on a true story, with lashings of crowd-pleasing melodrama. It concerns the fate of Maria Larsson, a put-upon wife and mother, who discovers an escape from her dreary world in the form of photography and the good-natured owner of the local studio. Those whose idea of Swedish cinema begins and ends with Ingmar Bergman will be astonished at the concentration here on an area almost entirely missing from that director's work, namely the working class. Troell portrays the turn-of-the-20 th -century reality of this with pitiless exactitude.
Secondly, there's a corps of solid performances, not least from Maria Heiskanen, who gives the central role the stolidity mixed with sly sensitivity that it deserves. And perhaps most importantly in a film whose subject is the imagery captured on camera, there's the extraordinary cinematography of Mischa Gavrjusjov and Troell himself. It captures the Swedish light so beautifully that it has the unfortunate side-effect of making Larsson's own efforts seem rather underwhelming. But just as her photos capture a scene forever in motionless limbo, so Troell's prettification of her world seems to preserve it in aspic, congealing around the drama so that the audience is put at one remove from it, and the sharp tang of experience is lost.
Furthermore, the film falls into the same trap as every biopic – the episodic structure. It leapfrogs from one event to the next without producing a coherent analysis of any or subsuming them into a larger conceptual framework. So political strife, proto-feminism, domestic abuse, infidelity, class envy – they're all touched upon but never developed.
But you can be too cynical. The story itself is an interesting one and it's heartening to see it dragged from the obscurity of history. And there's enough hard work from cast and crew to provide a couple of hours of intelligent entertainment. It's just that the pleasure obtained is so ephemeral – not so much Everlasting Moments as ones that finish at the cinema door.
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