Ljuder village, Sweden, 1844. After injuring himself trying to remove a rock from the land for famring, the father's leg is permanently disabled and he has to use crutches, so his son Karl Oskar takes over the farm. Karl Oskar marries Kristina and they have four kids, but the harvest is always bad: it's either too rainy, causing wheat to rot, to too dry, causing droughts. Karl Oskar's brother Robert spends too much time daydreaming and reading, so his boss Aron hits him when he catches him not working. Karl Oskar and Robert decide to emigrate to the US, hoping for a better life. Besides their families, they are also acompanied by priest Danjel who preaches alternative Christianity; ex-prostitute Ulrika; and Robert's co-worker Arvid. They take a carriage to Karlshamn, and from there on board a ship across the Atlantic. After 10 weeks, they reach America, and then take a train to Buffalo, and from there on a boat to Minnesota, hoping to settle at a Swedish farmer, the son of one of the passangers, but the latter lives only in a wooden shack. Still, Karl Oskar marks his territory on a nearby land.
Based on Vilhelm Moberg's eponymous novel exploring the Swedish emigration to the United States, Jan Troell's film "The Emigrants" is a dark, astringent, naturalistic and realistic epic about immigrants. At three hours, its running time is definitely overlong, and yet it's as if Troell takes his time to create a three-dimensional, 'larger-than-life' chronicle of one sample of Swedish immigrants, giving both a story of Sweden as well as the population origin of the 19th century United States, and thus the viewers will have to adjust to his frequency to accept the pacing. He uses high amounts of close-ups, more frequent than other directors, to conjure up a private, intimate point-of-view of this family and their friends from the village, and he gains huge support from the movie's two main actors: the excellent Max von Sydow as farmer Karl Oskar, and especially the wonderful, tender performance by the great Liv Ullmann as his wife Kristina. The first half of "The Emigrants" shows the harsh living conditions of the farm family (hunger, failed harvest, lack of money, overlong working hours...), as to give a sufficient motivation and explanation for their departure from their homeland, to such an extent that the locals start believing the most outlandish idealistic fairytales about America. For instance, in one scene Robert reads to Arvid from a book: "In America, no one works more than 12 hours a day, and many slaves have better houses, food and circumstances than peasants in Europe", so Arvid comments that he should sends himself as a slave to America to live better than now.
Faced with another bad harvest, the religious Kristina and the more somber Karl Oskar have this exchange: "We will put our faith in God". - "Faith... If it was just up to faith, we could reap a hundred barrels of wheat this autumn!" The long trip and departure of the protagonists takes up almost the entire second half of the film, to convene to the viewers the feel of a long journey the European immigrants endured back in that time. The 10-week ship journey is dark and depressing, showing how the passangers were trapped in the Ocean and faced with diseases, poor hygiene and food shortage. When Kristina finds out she got lice on ship, a passanger comments: "You know it's bad when even the lice is emigrating from Sweden!" A small humorous relief before this is when Robert talks with the naive Elin, who thinks that just by through faith she will immediately know English when she steps foot in America, so he tries to teach her a few English words beforehand, as to "take some of the burden off the Holy Spirit". Upon learning the English words for washing hands, Elin asks why the immigrants are given handbooks with instructions how to wash hands, so Robert gives another naive response: "It's probably because everything is so nice and clean in the new world that they have to ask those who came from the old, dirty world". Watching their plight, where some of the immigrants even die along the way, and how they are lost since nobody of the Americans speaks the Swedish languahge, the viewers gain symathy with the protagonists, and thus engage more with the story the longer it lasts. It is a conventional movie approach, without much directorial intervention or stylization, but it works, nontheless.
Grade:+++
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