ELVIRA MADIGAN Movie Review

Not as bad as you may remember, but you may still want to turn off the sound. The late Bo Widerberg's film about a young, married soldier (Thommy Berggren) and a circus tightrope artist (Pia Degermark) who run off together in Sweden in the late 1800s was based on the true story of a couple who chose death over living apart. The picture might have gained a little much-needed friction had the two principals not both been so beautiful; Pia Degermark has a face that simply astonishes, and Widerberg makes the most of it. The lush, almost oppressively lyrical photography and the soundtrack's ceaseless repetition of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 (commonly referred to now on those middle-of-the-night, “Greatest Classical Hits” TV commercials as the “Elvira Madigan Theme”) can distract the viewer from the movie's political subtext, yet Widerberg was making a clear and specific statement about a society that would impose such a rigid morality that these two harmless individuals would find no recourse other than suicide. Widerberg's next films, dalen '31 and Joe Hill, were concerned with directly political subject matter; it was only then that he was thought of here as something more formidable than the guy who made that gauzy love story with all the Mozart. (Elvira Madigan was a surprise hit in the U.S., thanks largely to a brilliant marketing campaign orchestrated by the New York based independent distributor/exhibitor Donald Rugoff.)

NEXT STOP … dalen '31, The Man on the Roof, Jerusalem

1967 (PG) 90m/C SW Pia Degermark, Thommy Berggren, Lennart Malmer, Nina Widerberg, Cleo Jensen; D: Bo Widerberg; W: Johan Lindstroem Saxon, Bo Widerberg; C: Jorgen Persson; M: Ulf Bjorlin. Cannes Film Festival '67: Best Actress (Degermark). VHS, LV WAC, FCT, TPV