Everlasting Moments (2009)

The Swedish director Jan Troell, best known for The Emigrants (1972), is in his late 70s, and he still works in a style that's the cinema equivalent of a horse-drawn carriage. Set at the turn of the century, this adaptation of Maria Larsson's memoir is a stoic, urban Little House on the Prairie with placid currents of Nordic despair. Maria (Heiskanen) struggles to raise her kids, and snaps photographs on the side, but her husband (Persbrandt) is a drunk and an adulterer, utterly uncomplicated in his loutishness. Everlasting Moments is all staged as a harsh poem of survival, with no great psychological interest, yet the ending carries a surprise feminist tug that's worth the wait. B

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