REVIEW: Everlasting Moments

Everlasting Moments (dir. Jan Troell, 2008) **

reviewed by David Sugarman

Sweden’s entry into the 2009 Academy Awards for Best Film in a Foreign Language did not make the list of nominees. I am not surprised. Sometimes films like Everlasting Moments catch some kind of critical zeitgeist and sweep the board, but there was no such luck for this stagnant, pompous portrait of family life in early 20th century Sweden.

The premise of the film is a rocky and apparently loveless marriage that seems to have been born entirely of the shared desire to own a camera, which is instantly put away and forgotten for years. When the wife, Maria, rediscovers the camera, she attempts to sell it, but is persuaded instead to do use it. Mostly the put-upon housewife uses it to pay the bills by charging her friends and neighbours for portraits, but the photography provides the one truly electric scene here, when Maria photographs the corpse of a child who has drowned for her friend. The movie is narrated by her daughter Maja, who was not present for 90% of the action and director Troell never attempts to explain how Maja knows what happens. Over the two-and-a-bit hours of its running time, Everlasting Moments shows its audience repeated incidents of domestic abuse perpetrated by the family’s patriarch, a boorish, philandering, idiot drunk of a man – one of the least sympathetic characters I have seen on screen- whose marriage we are asked to support. Actually, he’s probably the most interesting character in the piece. And he’s boring.

Walking out of the cinema, I heard countless elderly audience members praising this “lovely bit of social history”. Jan Troell’s film aims for grit and charm but manages instead to be both overly sentimental and soulless.

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This film made me angry. Has anyone else seen it? I’d like alternative opinions.

David