Word: elvira
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...What Elvira Madigan is about is not the wasting away of bodies, but the wasting away of love--even if (or because) that love is an ideal love. Who does not dream of it--fishing in the mirror fjords with a beautiful woman in a long white lace dress, the trout flopping in her lap, and you with your hat slouched over your eyes? Who does not dream...
...film whose sole purpose is to be beautiful, Elvira Madigan fails miserably. Beauty must be a unified thing. Elvira Madigan is a patch-work film--pieced together in a sloppy fashion, giving us no single theme and no unified execution...
...story is a Swedish folk tale set in the 1880's. Tight-rope dancer Elvira Madigan (16-year-old Pia Degermark) and army officer Sixten Sparre (Tommy Berggen) fall in love, desert their families to live together in the summer of a Scandinavian countryside. They catch butterflies, roll in the flowers, move along from resort hotel to resort hotel. But they run out of money. And, trying to keep their identities secret, they are unable to find work. On the edge of starvation, Sparre kills Elvira, then himself...
WIDERBERG is not sure where he is going. He introduces one conflict, then drops it. Sparre's soldier friend tries to shame Elvira into leaving Sparre by telling her that Sixten's deserted wife tried to commit suicide. Elvira runs away, but 30 seconds later Sparre catches her, tells her that his friend's story was a lie, and everything is fine again...
...WOULD suggest that Widerberg completely missed the point of the fable. He touched on it once or twice, but, in the main, he missed it. Elvira Madigan is not a story about two lovers who reject society and then die for their own love. It is a story of two lovers, loving ideally in a perfect setting, who find that their kind of love--the butterflies and the daisies and the wine and cheese--is not enough...