EVERLASTING MOMENTS (Jan Troell) Rating: NNNN
You could describe Everlasting Moments as the story of a woman whose love of photography offers her an escape from her wretched life, and that would be accurate enough. But it would miss the point of everything that makes the movie such a compelling drama.
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The full on-screen title of Jan Troell’s lovely Swedish drama is Maria Larsson’s Everlasting Moments, which better frames the action as the story of a working-class woman (played by Maria Heiskanen, of Aki Kaurismäki’s Lights In The Dusk) and her family from 1907 to sometime after World War I.
Life is not great. Maria’s dockworker husband, Sigfrid (Mikael Persbrandt), has a habit of coming home drunk and violent, and he’s growing paranoid about the possibility of being cuckolded – not that that stops him from stepping out himself.
Maria finds solace in her snapshots, and a kindred soul in the shopkeeper and portrait photographer (Jesper Christensen) who recognizes her talent and encourages her to develop it.
Yes, it’s the basic plot of a Lifetime movie, but told in a thoughtful, emotionally honest manner that lets the story and characters live and breathe. They aren’t thrust about like puppets for a cheap emotional payoff. Troell shows us the external pressures and personal weaknesses that turn Sigfrid into a bellowing monster, but he also lets us understand why Maria stays with him. As another great filmmaker once observed, everyone has his reasons.
Opens Friday (June 12) at the Bloor.
