A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, September 23, 2020

Here Is Your Life (Jan Troell, 1966)

Eddie Axberg in Here Is Your Life
Cast: Eddie Axberg, Ulla Sjöblom, Gunnar Björnstrand, Per Oscarsson, Ulf Palme, Signe Stade, Allan Edwall, Max von Sydow, Ulla Akselson, Stig Törnblom. Screenplay: Bengt Forslund, Jan Troell, based on novels by Eyvind Johnson. Cinematography: Jan Troell. Art direction: Rolf Boman. Film editing: Jan Troell. Music: Erik Nordgren. 

Life doesn't have a plot. It's a series of incidents, some causally connected, some not. At least that's the life presented in Here Is Your Life, a coming-of-age story about a boy in Sweden during the years that comprised World War I. (Not that the war had much to do with it in neutral Sweden.) What we see is the emerging consciousness of Olof Persson (Eddie Axberg), a boy who, because his father is seriously ill, was sent to live with a foster family and when he is on the brink of turning 14, goes off to seek his fortune. That takes him first to dangerous places like a logging camp and a sawmill, then to work for a man who runs a movie theater, including a stint as an itinerant projectionist, carrying the camera from place to place. We also see him working on the railroad and trying to organize workers into a strike. Bright and highly literate, he gets his ideas from Nietzsche and Marx, and tries to apply them to the world he encounters. The film ends with Olof, now on the verge of manhood, striking out alone as the camera soars away from him, a tiny figure isolated on the railroad tracks running through a snowy landscape. It's a lovely, disjointed but somehow coherent movie, with enigmatic characters and violent events mixed with mundane but often striking ones. His sexual awakening occurs, too, though not without a bit of violence and confusion there: Once, his rough male coworkers indulge in a bit of horseplay with Olof that verges on rape. Later, he strikes up a friendship with a somewhat older man that has homoerotic overtones when the two swim naked and afterward dance together. The encounters with girls are more typical of the portrayal of growing sexual awareness in film: He falls for a pretty girl but rejects her when he sees her with someone else and a friend tells him she's promiscuous. He deflowers another young girl and leaves her in tears. And he has an affair with a very experienced older woman, marvelously played by Ulla Sjöblom. Yet Troell's film never sinks into clichés or banality, and it's held together by the director-cinematographer-editor's vision and by the steady, attractive performance of Axberg in the key role of Olof. There are also some appearances by such familiar Swedish actors as Allan Edwall, Ulf Palme, Gunnar Björnstrand, and, of course, Max von Sydow. The film's 168-minute length is a bit daunting -- it lost 45 minutes in its American release -- and Troell never spells things out for the viewer, leaving us to explicate the changes in Olof's life on our own. But the epic ambition involved in adapting a quartet of novels by Nobel laureate Eyvind Johnson somehow results in an intimate portrait of growing up.    

No comments: