A beautiful love story without the usual clichés.
9/10
Author: Lina Westman from Sweden
23 May 2007

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I'm not usually a fan of these pure-love-conquers-all type of films, but I really liked Widebergs "Elvira Madigan". It's funny to see how many Americans think of it as "slow" and "boring" because there are so few dialogs and you already know the end. Old Scandinavian movies kind of follows their own way of building a story, nowadays they follow the American style more, which isn't bad either, just different. But even though a movie is made in a different way than you are used to, it might be worth giving it a chance.

"Elvira Madigan" needs to be read between the lines, you have to notice all the details to see the beauty and the complexity of the story, and since it's so "slow" you get a lot of time to do that. The dialogs are very few, but they all mean something. I especially liked when Sixten talked to his friend about that the world could be just one straw (if that's the right word?) of grass and that love is when you want to See the world from your lovers eyes.

Often when you try to explain love, all your words become clichés but in this film it's like you have never heard about love before. But actually I didn't really notice how good I thought this film was until the ending, when the beautiful picture of Hedvig capturing a butterfly froze to...Spoiler.Thanks to that frozen image,the beauty became immortal It wouldn't have been the same if you could actually see...spoiler. It left a nice, warm feeling in my chest that I think will stay for long.