"Moments" captures a life touched by photography

"A week after Mother met Father, she won a camera in a lottery," says a quiet voice-over at the beginning of veteran Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell's moving drama "Everlasting Moments." "Mother" is Maria (Maria Heiskanen), a working-class woman in 1907, and she did not then know that those two incidents would utterly change the course of her life. Indeed, she tries to sell the camera a few years later; needing grocery money to feed her children as her rough husband, Sigfrid (Mikael Persbrandt), is an alcoholic and an unreliable provider.

Captured in the beautifully dusty, amber light that pervades this film, the moment in which she tries to sell the camera is pivotal. Her jaw set with worry, Maria enters a small camera shop and hears something foreign yet beautiful: The proprietor Mr. Pedersen (Jesper Christensen) is playing the yearning notes of "Meditation" (from the Jules Massenet opera "Thais") on his violin. The music speaks of something beautiful yet out of reach; the air seems charged with art and hope. Pedersen kindly persuades Maria to keep the camera and shows her how it works. She stares at a resulting photo, with wonder; a small miracle, in her hands.

And so "Everlasting Moments" unfolds over the decades, showing us a life not entirely transformed by photography but profoundly touched by it. Maria uses her precious camera to capture moments in time — a lineup of her children on a couch; a cat dozing in the sun on a windowsill; a neighbor's pale, dead child lying peacefully in a sleep from which she will never waken — and gradually assumes her own photography business. Meanwhile, through the years, Pedersen gazes at Maria with quiet, unexpectant love. Though they never discuss it, they share more than a gift of seeing; their interactions, like that music, are heavy with the unspoken knowledge that here is something that cannot be.

Troell writes, in a director's note, that "Everlasting Moments" is based on a true story, inspired by Maria's real-life daughter, whom he met some years ago (and whose character narrates the film). Though Maria is long gone, her photographs remain behind; a mosaic of a unique life, now hauntingly captured twice.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or macdonald@seattletimes.com