Jan Troell’s account of Swedish farmers leaving for America is slow, plain and exact, and by the time the ship reaches the far side of the Atlantic it had us. Von Sydow and Ullmann carry it without raising their voices.
Vilhelm Moberg wrote four novels about a group of Swedish peasants who leave Småland for Minnesota, and Jan Troell and his producer Bengt Forslund turned them into two films. The Emigrants is the first. It runs 191 minutes, and by the end the people we have been watching have only just set foot on the land they crossed an ocean for. The second film, The New Land, picks up from there. Anyone who wants the whole story should set aside two evenings.
It is worth the two evenings. This is one of the plainest films we know about leaving home, and one of the best, and the plainness is the reason. Nobody makes a speech about the promise of America. Karl Oskar (Max von Sydow) wants to go because his field is mostly rock and his children are hungry. His brother Robert (Eddie Axberg) wants to go because the farmer he works for hits him. Danjel (Allan Edwall) wants to go because the church has decided his kitchen prayer meetings are a crime. Troell takes an hour and a half over this because he wants us to feel the weight of what they are leaving before he shows us what leaving costs.
Troell directs, shoots and cuts the film himself, and you can tell. The camera is often hand-held and close, on hands mending a plough or a child’s face at the table, and he lets available light do the work: low sun through a doorway, a single lamp in a hold. He holds shots long after another editor would have cut, so when Karl Oskar heaves a boulder out of the ground we see the whole effort. Ulla-Britt Söderlund’s costumes are wool and linen the colour of the earth they come from, and they darken as the film goes on. Erik Nordgren’s music is used sparingly enough that when it arrives, thin and folk-like, it registers as an event.
Von Sydow plays Karl Oskar as a man who has decided and will not discuss it again. He barely raises his voice in three hours. Liv Ullmann’s Kristina is the film’s conscience: she does not want to leave, says so, and goes anyway, and Ullmann shows the homesickness starting before the cart has left the yard. Axberg gives Robert a boy’s daydreaming and a boy’s bad luck. Monica Zetterlund, as Ulrika, the parish outcast who has found God and kept her tongue, is the one person on screen who seems to be enjoying herself. Edwall’s Danjel is gentle and slightly maddening, which is right.
Then the ship. We have seen a good many films cross the Atlantic and none that made us feel it in the stomach as this one did. Troell takes the camera down into the hold and stays there for what feels like weeks: bunks stacked in the dark, buckets, lice picked from seams, a storm heard through planks, passengers who sicken one by one. There is a stretch in which almost nothing happens except that people lie still and wait, and we realised we were waiting with them, wanting land as badly as they did. It is the best sustained sequence in the film and it is done with a hand-held camera and a few lamps.
The film’s faults are the faults of its method. The first hour is repetitive; there are two bad harvests where one would do. Sven-Olof Bern and Aina Alfredsson, as Karl Oskar’s parents, are given little to do but disapprove. Hans Alfredson’s Jonas Petter tells stories that stop the film rather than deepen it. And the religious strand, Danjel against the dean (Gustaf Färingborg), is filmed with a solemnity the rest of the picture is careful to avoid. Some critics have found the whole thing stolid, and we understand why. Troell’s people are not quick, and he refuses to make them quicker for our benefit.
The last stretch, on American soil, we will not describe, except to say that it ends where a lesser film would have put its intermission. That is the point. This is a film about how long the journey takes, and it makes you take it. Watch it in the afternoon, in one sitting, with the second film ready for the next night. The silences carry as much as the lines.
