I've mentioned a couple of times how I have a tendency to record enough foreign films that I don't quite get around to watching all of them until they're just about to expire from my YouTube TV cloud DVR. One night of TCM Imports included a pair of Swedish films, and I finally watched one of them: Here Is Your Life, from director Jan Troell.
The movie opens up around 1916. Olof (Eddie Axberg, who would appear in Troell's later films The Emigrants and The New Land) is a boy of around 14 in northern Sweden who has been forced to enter the working world because his father has some sort of terminal illness. Olof gets a job with a bunch of rather older men in forestry, specifically getting logs downstream to the lumber mills. It's difficult work and the sort of thing that led to industrial accidents and workers dying. Olof eventually takes a job in the mill part of forestry, and this time one of the workers is even younger, a boy named Oskar who really shouldn't be doing this work except that a good portion of rural Sweden was still poor enough that families had to send their children into work like this. Poor Oskar gets seriously injured when a pile of logs falls on him, and he later dies in hospital although we don't see the actual death.
In any case, all of this gets Olof to take a new job, especially since he's been doing some reading and shows some aptitude for intelligence even though he obviously hasn't had a lot of traditional schooling. That job is in a small town at a movie theater, although it's not a custom-built theater but the sort of space that would have been converted from something else into showing movies. Olof's job is to put up handbills for the coming attractions, as well as take tickets and sell snacks. If he's good enough, he might even be able to get a promotion to become a projectionist. This is also where Olof meets his first girl, although his love life, such as it is, isn't going to be straightforward. Olof also meets a socialist, although my reading of the timeline of the movie is that the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia had not yet taken place.
Olof's next job is indeed as a projectionist, although it's not with the theater he started at, but with an itinerant theater that sets up shop wherever it can. One stop is with a traveling circus, and it's there that Olof meets the woman who runs the shooting gallery. This too is going to be a complicated relationship. Olof eventually gets another job with Swedish Railways, which is a state-owned enterprise. That's worth mentioning since Olof is getting more heavily into socialism and workers' rights, railing against capitalism. He and his friend at the railway discuss getting the workers to strike as an anti-capitalist move, even though the railway is technically a socialist outfit. Olof goes on like this, until the movie ultimately ends with no clear resolution.
Then again, Here Is Your Life isn't a traditionally-plotted movie, but a coming-of-age story about one character, which is partly why I didn't mention the actors playing the other characters. Max von Sydow does appear, although I didn't recognize him. Axberg does a good job, and the cinematography is also quite good. However, I have to criticize the film for having a very slow pace and a way-too-long running time, at 160-some minutes. Either the movie should have been written to run into something under two hours, or it should have been conceived as something episodic like a TV miniseries. The adventures of Olof might work as a multiple-part miniseries, or what would nowadays be a limited series, but not as quite so well when it's one movie running close to three hours.
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