The 77-year-old Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell had his Hollywood moment in the 1970s, when his 1971 family saga The Emigrants was nominated for four Academy Awards, including one for Best Picture, a rare feat for a foreign-language movie. Its follow-up, The New Land, had to settle for a nomination for Best Foreign Film. Troell would end up burning off his good name in Hollywood by making two American films, the misconceived Zandy's Bride and the full-scale train wreck Hurricane; his movies haven't been especially well distributed in this country since, and neither The Emigrants nor The New Land nor his balloon-expedition film The Flight of the Eagle (which was nominated for Best Foreign Film in 1983) are available here on DVD. Troell's new picture Everlasting Moments probably won't do much to raise his profile in this country. It's stuck with a title that sounds like a Hallmark card, and that and the fact that it's another period family drama, set in the Swedish countryside in the early years of the twentieth century, will probably help to stigmatize it as something worthy and stone boring. (I've already heard one publicity flack--for a different movie, of course-- helpfully warn a critic on his way to a press screening that he should prepare to be bored stupid.) It's actually a terrific movie, a two hour-ten minute epic that takes its time but never feels dull.

The story of the marriage of Maria (Maria Heiskanen) and Siggi (Mikael Persbrandt) doesn't lack for incidents, and Troell doesn't beat them into a neat plotline; the marriage, with all its ups and downs and shifting emotions and divided loyalties, is the movie's story. The title, which specifically refers to Maria's passion for expressing herself through the still-new art of photography, is an apt one for the movie itself. Troell has achieved a level of such mastery that he can convey a rich texture of unresolved, multiple meanings out of his characters' hair and skin tones. He doesn't dazzle the viewer with self-conscious flash or hollow "artistry"; he simply invests his images with such emotional intelligence and shapes them so perfectly that they effortlessly take up permanent residence in your imagination. Troell has always had a gift for photographing the flesh of his performers in a way that gives his movies a warm erotic hum. In his earlier films, you could share the heroes' and heroines' sensual embrace of sweet human contact, and you could also feel the cruel chill that sank into their bones when it was withdrawn. Mikael Persbrandt's Siggi bullish laborer Siggi is a solid slab of muscle with a face that's both handsome and closed-off, though it lightens up when he gets to forget his problems and lose himself in childish play. It's the face of a thick lout, but it comes with the body of a satyr. The daughter who narrates the movie says at the end that she still doesn't understand why her parents stayed together, but Troell uses a single scene of Maria washing him by lamp light to make it clear how much the two of them are joined together by a carnal bond. Everlasting Moments is partly about the satisfaction of that kind of union; it's also partly about how the whole marriage can feel like a hellish mistake in the moments between bedroom dates, which must be getting farther and farther apart as the house fills to the rafters with kids.

Everlasting Moments is based on a true family story; the movie grew out of interviews that Troell's wife, Agneta Ulfsäter-Troell, began conducting in 1986 with Maja Larsson, a cousin of hers who was Maria and Siggi's daughter. This is a woman's picture in the sense of its point of view and sensibility, an argument for the quiet heroism of a gifted woman who may have sacrificed her best chances for happiness and creative fulfillment to keep her family together. Maria is best able to stand up to her husband--who doesn't like her taking pictures and turns violent when he picks up on signals that she's formed a (chaste) romantic attraction to a married photographer (Jesper Christensen) who's encouraged her in her craft--when she's using her gift for practical purposes, earning money by taking Christmas photos of her neighbors. (Of course, the chance that she could support herself without his help doesn't do much to mollify him.) At his most affable, Siggi entertains the children by breaking out the accordian and flexing his tattoo; his physicality is the only way he can connect even with his kids, and his size turns scary when he's drunken and pissed off. One's admiration of this movie only grows if you imagine how easily an American hack could have turned it into a hot mess of cliches about feminine self-expression trampled underfoot by clumsy male rage; it could have been Lifetimey as all the bedamned. Troell turns Oprah's Book Club material into something both earthy and almost unearthly.