Trailer of Everlasting Moments
You wonder how this effort — Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick in its original Swedisagh title — failed to get even a nomination for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
First you've got veteran Swedish director Jan Troell (nominated for Best Director in 1973 for The Emigrants) to supply the trappings of art. Next you've got an inspiring story about a matriarch (Maria Heiskanen) in early-20th-century Stockholm who holds her family together despite a drunken husband, social revolution, and World War I.
Between being beaten and raising their dozens of children, she finds time to practice the young art of photography. So there's your self-reflexivity and your phony feminism. With its showy performances, period look, and platitudes posing as profundities, this schmaltzy hokum should have been an Oscar shoo-in. But aside from an image of a hovering Zeppelin, a photo of a dead girl, and a scene-stealing horse, Everlasting Moments is merely everlasting.
