Maria Larsson’s Eviga Ӧgonblick /Everlasting Moments
(Originally published in my blog Draupadiarjun on October 15, 2010)
On her upturned palm, Maria Larsson sees in black and white the form and movement of a butterfly. It’s an image through the lens of a Contessa camera. It’s also Maria’s left hand, thus scientific witchery and the magical possibilities of insight nestle right next to the real, solid wedding band.
The Contessa camera is in view while the opening credits are rolling in Everlasting Moments (2008). The venerable imagemaker is itself captured with love and lyricism. Obligingly, it displays its mechanical ingenuity, but how life-changing it might be we only start knowing twenty-two minutes into the movie.
Maria’s daughter Maja recounts her parents’ story. It all began with this very camera. Maria won it at a raffle a week after she met Sigfrid. Sigfrid said the camera was his as he bought the raffle ticket. Maria replied that if he wanted to share the camera, he’d have to marry her. The couple lived in Malmö in the opening decade of the twentieth century. Children were born, Sigfrid, who used to sail, became a dockworker, an anarchist, an off-and-on alcoholic, and a full-time philanderer. Maria took care of the family, scrubbed floors and took in sewing. The camera lay forgotten till it occurred to Maria one morning that it could be sold. She took it to a studio, and her life changed.
It's a true life retold by famous Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell. The story is based on Maja Oman’s reminiscences, as told to journalist Agneta Ulfsater-Troell, who is a great-niece of Maria Larsson’s and Troell’s wife.
Rarely have I had so vivid a sense of a woman’s life through cinema as I did in Everlasting Moments. The only other movie to achieve this in my memory was Pather Panchali (1955), with Sarbajoya, played by Karuna Banerjee. Maria is firmly rooted in place and time and seasons, in a specific community, first in Malmö and then in Limhamn – still, the direction is so poetic and aware of moments and sensations that comprise and define a life that the movie really gives us this woman, in her work apron, her good thin coat and hat, her homemade skirts. Finnish actress Maria Heiskanen plays her, really becoming Maria. Heiskanen’s dark eyes portray a sea of emotions as Maria Larsson looks at her husband, her children, her mentor, her employer, at the women on the welfare board. Her eyes, forced to be stern most of her life, can soften with love and happiness. On a very few occasions, they fill with tears. When they look through the viewfinder of the Contessa, they see, breaking free from “Maria Larsson” and her constricting life.
The movie being a tribute to a photographer and to photography, Troell chooses each of his frames in order to say something more than the main story. The night the Larssons arrive in Limhamn in 1914 and turn on a light bulb for their first time, the family’s happiness and new hopefulness spills out of their lighted window. Outside, in the cold night, a woman pauses to look up. Sebastian Pedersen makes a fist while seeing off Maria at the porch of his studio, the day she sees the butterfly on her palm. When Pedersen and Leo leave town, Maria runs to catch a last glimpse; it does not occur to her to take her camera. Siggi starts a hauling business and takes Maria along to view a house he wants. Maria looks subtly different: she is less brisk, the busy mother and working woman whose life depended on getting every chore done fast and right the first time, now appears to have time on her hands. Strands escape the neat whorls of her bun. When her cinematic history comes full circle, she lets out a trapped butterfly and turns quietly away from Troell’s camera, facing, instead, the splendor of the sunny day.
In an interview, Troell said he hoped people would feel something when they watched Everlasting Moments, but he did not much care about what exactly they felt. Well, it is hard to watch this film without feeling something.
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