A Swedish Director’s Literary Lens
Jan Troell, left, on the “Everlasting Moments” set. He says he’s not what film companies look for.
At the age of 77 the Swedish director Jan Troell — after a four-decade career that includes a best picture prize at the Berlin Film Festival, a Golden Palm nomination at Cannes and a best picture Oscar nomination — is among the world’s most distinguished filmmakers. He is also practically invisible in the United States.
Trailer: 'Everlasting Moments'
Maria Heiskanen and Mikael Persbrandt in “Everlasting Moments.”
Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow in Mr. Troell’s “Emigrants,” from 1971, which was up for an Oscar for best picture.
Only two of his films, the well-regarded 1996 “Hamsun,” about the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, and “Hurricane,” a misfire from his brief sojourn in Hollywood in the late 1970s, are available here on DVD. His masterpieces — “The Emigrants,” “The New Land,” “The Flight of the Eagle” — have not been in print since the days of the laser disc.
It’s a state of affairs that can drive his American fans to distraction but that does not appear to hold any particular interest for Mr. Troell.
“I haven’t really thought about that,” Mr. Troell (pronounced tro-el) said by phone from his home near Malmo recently before politely moving the discussion to more relevant topics, like the opening in New York and Los Angeles on Friday of his latest movie, “Everlasting Moments,” a 2009 Golden Globe nominee for best foreign-language film. It will be the first Troell movie released in the United States in 12 years, but who’s counting?
Mr. Troell’s relative obscurity here might seem surprising given the splash he made in America with his third film, “The Emigrants,” in 1972. The story of 19th-century farmers making an epic journey from southern Sweden to the forests of Minnesota earned four Oscar nominations that year: for best adapted screenplay, director, actress (Liv Ullmann) and picture. It is still one of only eight foreign-language films to get a best-picture nod.
But possible reasons for his low profile, beyond the natural reserve evident in conversation, come to mind easily. There’s the Ingmar Bergman factor, for one thing. Perhaps there has been room in the American consciousness for only one 20th-century Swedish cinematic genius. Mr. Troell, of course, was quick to dismiss the notion that he had worked in his countryman’s shadow.
“I would prefer to say I’ve been in the sun of Bergman,” he said. “His films have always inspired me.”
And Mr. Troell has not been prolific, making 12 features in 43 years. He said that with documentaries and television films he had worked more or less steadily but acknowledged that his pace was deliberate.
“It has taken a very long time for several of the films to be financed,” he said, “mainly because I have not been what film companies usually are looking for. And I’ve been quite expensive sometimes too.”
That comes with the territory when you have a fondness for making long, meticulously designed period dramas like “The Emigrants” and its sequel, “The New Land,” both three hours plus, or the two-and-a-half-hour polar exploration story “The Flight of the Eagle,” set in 1897 and requiring the re-creation of a balloon flight over the Arctic ice cap. There are no car chases or costumed superheroes here, though Mr. Troell’s avoidance of mass-market material is paired with an extraordinarily accessible, straightforward narrative style.
“Everlasting Moments” is a period film too, set around World War I, though at 131 minutes it is practically a short by Troell standards. It differs from his earlier American releases in being primarily a domestic drama, tracking the life of a poor Malmo family.
But the themes of heroism and fearless exploration that run through Mr. Troell’s work are present in the character of the struggling wife and mother Maria Larsson, played by the Finnish actress Maria Heiskanen. Like the emigrant Karl-Oskar, the balloonist S. A. Andree and the aviatrix Elsa Andersson (in the 2001 “As White as in Snow,” never released in America), Maria is an adventurer, even if she travels nowhere. Her vehicle is the bulky camera she wins in a raffle.
For Mr. Troell the story of how photography changes Maria’s life was doubly appealing: the character was based on his wife’s great-aunt, and her journey mirrored his own.
“I started when I was 14,” he said. “I was given a used camera almost the same as the one she uses, 9-by-12-centimeter glass plate. For me it was a similar adventure as it must have been for Maria, the miracle, the mystery of the images coming in the red light” of the darkroom.
Mr. Troell worked as a still photographer and a schoolteacher before breaking into movies, and it’s tempting to see the mark of those professions in his filmmaking style: humanist, literary, cerebral yet fast moving, with a constant emphasis on clear storytelling.
It’s an aesthetic, and an ethos, summed up by the photography studio owner played by Jesper Christensen in “Everlasting Moments”: “What do you see as you look through the camera, Maria? You see a world, there to be explored — to preserve, to describe. Those who’ve seen it — they cannot merely close their eyes. You can’t turn back."
There are more explorations in Mr. Troell’s future, despite some issues with hearing and memory. (Asked what movies he’d liked recently, he said the titles rarely stayed in his head, but then quickly summoned up “Lars and the Real Girl” — “Really unusual” — and “Frozen River.”)
His new project, a script he is composing with the Danish screenwriter Klaus Rifbjerg, does not sound destined to raise his profile in the United States. It’s another period drama, set in Sweden during World War II, and its protagonist, the real-life anti-Nazi activist Torgny Segerstedt, is the most anachronistic of heroes: a crusading newspaper editor.
As if that’s not enough, Mr. Troell threw in a last notion: “I’m thinking of making this one in black and white.”
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