Opening against another cumbersome 2008 Oscar nominee -- Nikita Mikhalkov's 12 -- this weekend, Everlasting Moments wears its history far more gracefully. Making grocery money as a maid and mender, Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen) finds herself determined to keep her camera while the local photography store owner, nicknamed Piff Paff Puff (Jesper Christensen, Mr. White from the last two Bond films), finds a buyer. Her husband Sigfrid (the great Mikael Persbrandt) thinks she should trade it for some extra change until she shows him a sepia-tinted portrait she took of their brood. What follows are long bouts of expected drama followed by minor variations on this discourse.
As if culled from some infinite picture book from the early 1900s, Troell's work as a cinematographer takes center stage for much of the film. The director offers a seemingly endless queue of transfixing images: the crisp morning sunrays filtered through lace curtains onto the family cat, the small town community enjoying a day in the humming spring air, an alienated girl's march into a foggy ether. Like Maria, who begins to take portraits of her neighbors for nominal fees, the film expresses its emotions and ruminations much more gracefully when little is said.
Regretfully, Troell and screenwriter Niklas Rådström have hampered the work with sap and an easy confrontation that belittles the film's hypnotic pull. Sigfrid, a complex creation that Persbrandt plays brilliantly, gets the brunt of the witless, bland dialogue, but the larger problem is with the vast amount of arbitrary diversions that Troell indulges in. At 132 minutes, the script often feels like it can't decide whether it's more interested in Maria or Sigfrid, a struggle which would be fascinating if it wasn't so often padded by scenes as utterly meaningless as, say, an employer's attempted rape of Maja.
At its most refined, Everlasting Moments suggests a transplanted Terence Davies, capturing moments of fluttery youth and encumbered adulthood as if they were being expressed through a visual quill. More times than not, however, Troell seems more fascinated by the question of why Maria stays with her husband than with the majesty of his imagery. One could ponder that, like her camera, Maria finds a genuine mystery and a sincere confrontation in Sigfrid, who feels the world can not afford her. But ultimately, like the montage of clicking gears and snapping coils that opens the film, it takes a lot more than just seeing where everything goes to understand how something works.
Aka Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick.
