A few days back my friend Pia invited me to go see the foreign film "Everlasting Moments" with her and tonight we both finally had a free night to go. The movie chronicles the experiences of a Swedish family in the early 1900s. The style of the movie is similar to the realist movement in literature in that it doesn't feature a strong central plot that drives the narrative, but instead focuses on the ordinary details of the ordinary lives of an ordinary family. As such, it proceeds at a very leisurely pace and meanders a bit in spots, but it is a journey worth taking.
One of the central themes of the movie is the search for fulfillment and happiness. For the coarse, abusive brute that is the family's husband/father, this search initially leads to the illusory joys of alcohol and adultery, and later to caring for an injured horse. For the eldest daughter, it's her desire to become a teacher. For the eldest son, his desire to become a scholar. But the movie's primary focus is on the wife/mother of the family's quest for happiness, a search which leads her to discover photography.
Photography is in many ways the deus ex machina in this movie, working to push and pull the characters in various ways. At the beginning of the movie, the eldest daughter who narrates the film recounts how her mother won a camera in a raffle with a ticket purchased by her eventual husband. When he said the camera should be his given that he paid for the ticket, she said he could only have if he married her, which he then did. The camera, however (a portable Contessa with a collapsible bellows), is quickly packed away and forgotten, only to be rediscovered many years later when the women is cleaning house. She takes it to a local photography studio to sell it, but the proprietor of the studio convinces her that she should at least try the camera before she sells it.
She does, and quickly discovers that she has both a passion and a skill for photography. Her talent for photography eventually leads to her selling a photo to the local newspaper, taking portraits for her neighbors and later for merchants and more well-to-do clients, and also serves as the seed for her unconsummated affair of the heart with the studio owner.
From the end credits, it appears that the movie is not a work of pure fiction but is instead based on the lives of an actual family as recounted in the reminiscences of the eldest daughter. The movie is interesting and compelling, if a bit long-ish, but don't expect slam bang action or neat resolutions to difficult questions. In the end it's a realistic portrait of people's lives, much in the way that a photograph is, and real life is seldom sensational or tidy. But, just the same, life is worth living and this movie is worth seeing.
(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)
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