It is that magical, freeing quality of photography that director Jan Troell captures so beautifully in his film Everlasting Moments (Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick). Troell, who began his career as a cinematographer and still shoots most of his own films (he shared credit here with Mischa Gavrjusjov), takes the art of photography with the utmost seriousness, and each shot in the film is testament to the powers of composition and lighting, as well as the internalized understanding we have of faded colors and grain (the entire film has the wintry look of old photographs rediscovered in a box in the back of a closet). Troell is still best known for his historical dramas of the early 1970s, The Emigants (1971) and The New Land (1972), and Everlasting Moments, with its powerful evocation of a time long since past that still speaks to us in the present, is cut from the same cloth, although it bears the traces of an older filmmaker (he’s now 75) who can imbue each frame with his own bittersweet understanding of the great passage of time.

The film tells the story of the contentious marriage between Maria and Sigfrid Larsson (Maria Heiskanen and Mikael Persbrandt) over a 15-year period beginning in 1907, when photography was an established medium of representation and expression, but was still largely outside the purview of non-professionals. The story is narrated by their daughter Maja, who is eight years old when the film begins, but is clearly speaking from a great distance in time (visually and tonally, the film strikes a powerful sense of fading memories in danger of disappearing forever). Maja tells us that Maria won a Contessa folding camera at a carnival while Sigfrid was still courting her, and we see Maria rediscover the camera several years later and learn to use it, first out of curiosity, but then out of a deep-felt need to escape her place in life, even as it causes her guilt by taking away from her responsibilities as a mother. She also feels guilt because she is drawn to Sebastian Pedersen (Jesper Christensen), a kind-hearted photographer who owns a studio and helps her procure chemicals and supplies, thus encouraging her hobby when no one else does. His kindness is a light in the dark, and their relationship is a quiet, unspoken dance of mutual respect and growing attraction.

The events depicted in the film are based on the memoirs of Majan Oman, the real-life Maria’s daughter who is a distant cousin of Troell’s wife, Agneta Ulfsäter-Troell. Shaped into an elegant screenplay by Niklas Rådström (with help from the Jan and Agneta), Maja’s memories provide an emotionally stirring portrait of life in Sweden in the second decade of the twentieth century, both politically and domestically. The contentious working environment, fraught with strikes and divided among various political factions, shape the alternately blissful and tumultuous homelife of the Larssons, as Sigfrid is in and out of work, putting a financial strain on the already strapped family (they live in a one-room apartment with half a dozen children). Sigfrid is also a difficult man to live with; big, boisterous, and lively, he is also prone to getting drunk and violent and has an eye for other women, which frequently leads him astray. Gender dynamics of the era ensure Maria’s loyalty despite being a victim of physical violence and emotional neglect, yet one of the film’s most powerful elements is its refusal to draw simplistic lines and turn Sigfrid into a one-note monster or Maria into a martyr. Late in the film, Maja’s voice-over informs us that she never understood why her mother stayed with her father, and while we have no real explanation either, the film makes us feel their togetherness despite the discord, and it is telling that Troell chooses to put this line of narration over a still image of them dancing, reminding us once again of photography’s power to capture that which escapes us.

Copyright ©2010 James Kendrick

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