Everlasting Moments

Everlasting Moments
by Marilyn Elliot

In the beginning, Everlasting Moments feels like a Swedish A Tree Grows In Brooklyn or maybe I Remember Mama. In voice over, the eldest daughter tells the story of her family: hard working mother, hard drinking father, stair step children, the proud poor living in a Swedish tenement in the early 1900s . There is also an outsider, drawn to the mother, who is both sympathetic and supportive, and maybe a little in love with her. But Everlasting Moments soon turns into a much darker story than Tree, never mind Mama.

The husband and father in this film is not a charming, adored, alcoholic patriarch, but an abusive, often drunk, philanderer by the name of Sigfrid Larsson. In a brilliant performance by Mikael Persbrandt, Larsson is a dock worker who, because of his size and strength, finds work when other men are passed over. We get the impression that he has been the apple of his mother's eye and therefore, feels he is special, entitled to whatever he desires, including the attentions of other women. He makes endless vows to the Temperance Society and breaks them all. Apolitical, he makes political enemies, goes on strike, and has no work. Under the influence, he can be joyfully expansive or scarily violent. He becomes unjust to his children and threatening to his wife, but he can also be patient and compassionate when handling horses, talking with his despondent best friend, and, on occasion, with his family. He is, in other words, a well rounded character, with flaws and strengths, a product of his time and culture. Viewers will despise him and reluctantly, perhaps, understand him.

But Everlasting Moments is really Maria's story. Maria, Sigfrid's long suffering Finnish wife and mother of his children, who cleans other people's houses to support her family until her husband, with boorish authority, forbids it. When, needing money, she attempts to sell a camera she once won in a lottery to a local camera shop, the photographer sees something in both the undeveloped plate in the camera and in the woman before him, and makes a deal with her. He will buy the camera but she must first take some pictures, to prove it works; he will provide the film plates and developing chemicals. Tentative at first, she begins, in an era in which photographs were not commonplace, to photograph the people and things she sees. The photographer is impressed, both with her eye and with Maria herself, and their arrangement continues, sporadically, through several years and events of Maria's life. The everlasting moments of the title are those in which Maria finds distraction and delight, solace and reward, monetary as well as artistic, in her photography. The camera is her liberator; it gives her expression and a certain autonomy. As outstanding as Persbrandt's performance is, Maria Heiskanen as Maria, outshines him. She is young, she is old, she is dignified, she is shamed, she is luminous, she is exhausted, she is gentle, she is defiant, she is….well, incredible. She portrays Maria as a faithful, obedient, but never weak willed or slavish woman/wife. She is a woman of her time, who occasionally appears to channel a woman of today. Heiskanen especially makes all Maria's actions and decisions seem real and rational, as if she's thought it through and come to the only or best choice she can at the time. She is, in a word, utterly convincing. Okay, that's two words, but still true.

This is a richly layered film. At the core, it is one woman's personal triumph and independence through art. But her story is embedded in the gradually changing social, political, cultural and economical influences of a specific time and place, which happens to be Sweden in the early 20th century. Tragedy and deep irony underscore many of the images in the film, as when Maria, setting up to take a child's photograph, first takes another photograph. The first photograph impresses her photographer friend so much that he insists on paying her for it; it is her first real photographic triumph. The second photograph, presented by Maria to the mother, elicits a line of dialogue so terrible that it breaks our hearts. In another scene we see Maria attempt to solve a problem based on a neighbor's gossip, only to find out the "solution" was a lie. We watch as musically talented, academically ambitious children with gifts and dreams, take up the same hard labor of their parents' generation, and we fear for their hands, their virtues and their futures. We see Sigfrid's rage and Maria's adamant defiance, and we both celebrate and fear for her.

I watched this on Netflix instant and at times the transition seemed abrupt, as if scenes had been cut or clipped. Imdb says it was shot on 16mm and transferred to 35mm; maybe that accounts for it. But, that minor criticism aside, this is a film I highly recommend. See it and be glad.