Have you ever heard Rachmaninoff's Brief Encounter Piano Concerto? Don't you just love Beethoven's Clockwork Orange Symphony? What about Schubert's Barry Lyndon Piano Trio?
No, I thought not. Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Schubert's Piano Trio in E flat are never referred to by those nicknames, even though those works are prominently featured in the films of those names. "Elvira Madigan" has achieved the virtually unique feat, for a film, of bestowing a nickname on a famous piece of Classical music. When I first discovered Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 as a teenager in the late seventies I wondered why it was often referred to as the "Elvira Madigan Concerto". (I had not seen the film at that time. Was the mysterious lady Mozart's lover or the dedicatee of the work?) Indeed, the name is still sometimes used, even though the film itself is today much less famous than it once was.
The true story on which the film is based is well-known in Sweden and Denmark; this was one of three cinematic versions, but the only one to have become well-known outside Scandinavia. (There was another Swedish version from 1943 and a Danish one, also from 1967). In the summer of 1889 Lieutenant Count Sixten Sparre, an aristocratic officer in the Swedish Army, deserted and eloped with a Danish tightrope dancer named Hedvig Jensen, even though he was married with two children. (Hedvig worked under the stage name of Elvira Madigan, hence the title of the film). They spent about a month wandering through the Danish countryside, but eventually died together in a suicide pact after they ran out of money. (No, that's not a spoiler; the opening titles make the eventual fate of the young couple quite clear from the start). Despite Sparre's aristocratic status, he does not appear to have been wealthy.
The film tells the story of this tragedy in a simple, unadorned way. We see almost nothing of Sixten's life in the military or Elvira's life with the circus. Apart from the two lovers, the only character of any significance is Kristoffer, Sixten's friend and brother-officer, who tries to persuade him to return to his wife, his children, his country and his duty as a soldier. He fails, of course; Sixten realises that there can be no turning back to his old life and that as soon as he steps on Swedish soil he will be clapped in jail as a deserter.
In the fifties Swedish cinema had been dominated by the figure of Ingmar Bergman, but in the sixties younger directors like Bo Widerberg were reacting against Bergmanism, and, visually, "Elvira Madigan" is about as different from the gloomy monochrome look of a Bergman film as one could imagine. Hedvig (she prefers to refer to herself by her real name) and Sixten wander together through a beautiful, verdant summer landscape lit by almost perpetual sunshine. (There is one brief scene set in a rainstorm). The dominant colours are the green of the vegetation and the gold of the ripening corn, of the sunlight and of the lovely Pia Degermark's hair. The one contrasting colour is the red dress of a little girl who appears in several key scenes. Mozart's wonderful slow movement fits in well with the general ethereal mood.
Degermark received "Most Promising Newcomer" nominations at both the Golden Globes and BAFTA Awards and won "Best Actress" at the Cannes Film Festival, and her charm and innocence, quite different to the more worldly beauty of a Hollywood superstar, played a vital role in the success of the film. She did not, however, go on to become a star herself, making only a handful of films (none of them well known) after this one. Her co-star Thommy Berggren has become a well-known actor in Sweden (he starred in, among other things, "Joe Hill", also directed by Widerberg) but is less well-known internationally.
The popularity of the film at the time of its release, and possibly also its comparative neglect in more recent years, can be explained by the way in which Widerberg seemed to capture the spirit of the sixties so well, even though the story was set in the nineteenth century. Sixten and Hedvig can be seen as hippies born eighty years before their time; they have "dropped out" of society to embrace nature and the simple life, rejecting both militarism and materialism and proclaiming, by their actions, that "all you need is love". Of course, man (and woman) cannot live by love alone, and they have to pay the price for defying the values of their society. The central question posed by the film is whether the blame for their tragedy lies with that act of defiance, or with those very values themselves.
Another question is whether their freedom from social values has been bought at too great a cost to others. We hear from Kristoffer that Sixten's wife Henrietta has attempted suicide following his desertion of her. Sixten dismisses this as a lie, but it is clear that his behaviour must have caused great distress to his family.
"Elvira Madigan" can be seen as a sixties artefact, just as much as a mini-skirt, a lava lamp, an E-type Jaguar or a Beatles LP are sixties artefacts, but that does not necessarily mean that it is of no interest today. Its visual beauty, and the rather naive idealism with which it is infused, help to make it watchable nearly fifty years after it was made. 7/10