HÄR HAR DU DITT LIV / HERE IS YOUR LIFE (1966)

Co-writing, shooting, editing & directing (what, no catering?), Jan Troell proved a master of all film crafts right from the start in this striking debut feature.  Daring, too; adapting Nobel Prize winner Eyvind Johnson's quartet of autobiographical novels into a deliberately paced, fully absorbing three-hour coming-of-age tale set in neutral Sweden over the course of the First World War.  Eddie Axberg, whom you may know as the young brother in Troell’s THE EMIGRANTS/’71, is the likable/honorable teen from a poor family with a chronically ill father who matures thru a hardscrabble series of jobs tough: logging, brick mill, train mechanic; and jobs easy (movie house multi-tasker).  Along the way acquiring radical leftist mentors; girls & experienced women; an admirably consistent line-up of pain-in-the-ass bosses; and an autodidact’s cover-to-cover reading habit.  (The kid did grow up to win the Nobel Prize.)  Shot in a variety of styles (docu/Neo-Realist/poetic/symbolic) that always hang together (New Wave never far away, especially in a bike-riding lesson that might have come from JULES ET JIM/’62), yet with Troell’s unmistakable fingerprints.  A few supporting players come from the Ingmar Bergman stable, but everyone is a marvel; often very funny within a pretty grim bildungsroman Dickens might have found dark for his taste.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Just the Double-Bill to follow a nearly three-hour film, THE EMIGRANTS/’71 and THE NEW LAND/’71, a Double-Bill on its own running a further six-and a half hours.  Yikes!  All three films severely truncated in initial Stateside runs, all worth every damn minute.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/09/utvandrarna-emigrants-1971-nybyggarna.html

ATENTION MUST BE PAID: In spite of interviews and a big essay in the Criterion edition, there’s no mention of the film’s unusually charged homoerotic swimming scene & dance for Axberg and Stig Törnblom, his womanizing anarchist pal.  In a film full of ellipses (something of a Troell specialty), it’d be nice to know just how it was meant to be taken.  Is that a pass from Törnblom that abruptly ends the boys’ nude idyll?   We never find out since Törnblom soon develops an STD from a date (with a girl?/with a boy?) and is out of the pic after that.  Perhaps this is clearer in the novels.