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Rating: Paradise. Just as the finest iconography depicts it: blue skies, blooming meadows, and a golden light that seems to infuse magic into the warm air. As in any paradise worthy of the name, there is a young and beautiful couple in love. The woman is truly stunning: an angelic creature with the inevitable blue eyes, blonde hair, and porcelain skin. So, is everything perfect?
Of course not. The serpent, in this case, is “real life”: the beautiful Elvira – who wants to be called by her real name, Hedvig – is a tightrope walker who left the circus for love. He is Lieutenant Sixten Sparre: married, father of two, a deserter and a spendthrift. But we’ll get to that.
The film is a feast for the senses: splendid cinematography, sublime soundtrack. Mozart, Concerto No. 21, now universally known as “Elvira Madigan”. The couple seems happy, strolling through the fields, she’s a vision in gold with her hair loose, he’s elegant in black, kind and polite. A romantic picnic… but the spilled bottle of wine, a somewhat heavy-handed symbol, reminds us that not everything is idyllic.
We soon discover that the couple is “illicit,” that the abandoned wife is unhappy—or perhaps not—and that Hedvig cannot work because he is jealous, but incapable of providing. Summer is coming to an end, so is the money. Only one escape remains, and it’s not a spoiler: the film actually opens with the epilogue. Sixten shoots Hedvig before killing himself, but the last image spares us the brutality of reality: she smiles in a field, trying to catch a butterfly. Ironic, but it does not come across as such.
The film is based on real events and, as often happens, embellishes them: the two lovers spent only a short time together, from late May to July 18, 1889. Less than the famous “nine and 1/2 weeks,” apparently the maximum duration for a torrid affair. The ethereal photography shows us the bright side of that brief summer and once again glides over reality—their bodies found three days after the murder-suicide.
The sessantottina counterculture loved it, seeing in their escape the apotheosis of free love. Ignoring, naturally, that the two were incapable of living in reality: when the money runs out, they gather mushrooms and grass from the meadows, eating them before vomiting up the indigestible lunch. The flower children missed the irony.
Perhaps marriage is the “graveyard of love”, as tired clichés claim. But if the alternative is nine and 1/2 weeks and a shot to the head, then that grave—which, after all, can be warm, welcoming, and lasting—might not be so bad after all.
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