Elvira Madigan

Elvira Madigan Jo-Ann Wallace (bio) It opens with a young child, a girl of five or six, stooping, plucking, blowing the weightless silky seed fluffs of a milkweed plant. The child stops short, arrested by the sight of something nearby. Shot-reverse shot. Two bodies, a man and a woman, unmoving, entwined on the forest floor. A white parasol, a picnic basket. All so quick we can hardly take it in. The little girl turns and runs. High angle shot. The bodies below are motionless; all is still but for the humming and buzzing of insects. Suddenly the scene explodes with movement. Not dead, only asleep. The man's bottom has been stung by a bee and he reacts with hilarious, histrionic excess, rolling in the sunny grass, insisting he will never sit down again. It is 1889. He is a Swedish cavalry officer, married with two children, who has deserted his post and his wife; she is a Danish tightrope walker who has run away from her stepfather's circus. In each other they have found themselves. They are playful, affectionate, tender, luminous with love. But as he shaves off his beard to disguise himself and turns to embrace her, the razor in his hand, its blade, still heavy with shaving soap, rests against the back of her head, against the bare skin of her languid arm. They walk away, and the sun shines through the fabric of her conventionally pretty butter-yellow dress, outlining her strong young legs. The second movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 echoes throughout, plaintive, sweet, yearning. I first saw Elvira Madigan almost fifty years ago when, several Saturdays in a row, a small handful of us—aged sixteen, I think—took the suburban commuter train into Montreal to attend a McGill Student Union international film series. We saw The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Tony Richardson's bleak 1962 film based on the Allan Sillitoe short story of the same name. Black-and-white, British kitchen-sink realism, the angry working-class young man against the system. We saw Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film The Seventh Seal, brooding, impossibly confusing to [End Page 62] my sixteen-year-old mind, though the potent image of Death the chess player has stayed with me ever since. And we saw Elvira Madigan, the 1967 Swedish film directed by Bo Widerberg. Today the film is most remembered for its musical score, what the film credits describe as its "leitmotiv," Vivaldi's Four Seasons and, especially, the Andante from Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21, which has, ever since then, been popularly known as the Elvira Madigan Concerto. I remember being made breathless by the closing scene of the film, a freeze-frame shot of Hedvig, her face full of wonder, her hands raised to release the butterfly she has just caught, as two gunshots ring out. Oh! The unbearable sadness and beauty! The butterfly: her soul, their love! Within six months of seeing that film my own first and overwhelming love showed up, a love that, like Hedvig's and Sixten's, opened to the world of death, though less poignantly or picturesquely, or even mutually. Love and death, eros and thanatos. It would be corny if it wasn't so recurrently, insistently true, like a heartbeat. In the years that followed, I often thought I must have been primed, groomed for that first love by movies like Elvira Madigan, novels like Wuthering Heights ("It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn"), the inevitable Romeo and Juliet ("My bounty is as boundless as the sea, / My love as deep; the more I give to thee, / The more I have, for both are infinite"), even songs like Percy Sledge's When a Man Loves a Woman ("he'd give up all his comforts and sleep out in the rain, if she said that's the way it ought to be"). Romantic love, that modern outgrowth of the medieval courtly love tradition, itself an outgrowth of the ancient blood sacrifice, Christ's endless and redeeming love. "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it." Perfect...

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