Nybyggarna

I can't believe it's been a year since I blogged about The Emigrants, the first film in Swedish director Jan Troell's two-movie story about a family of Swedes who, unable to make a living in Sweden, decide to emigrate to America circa 1850. I finally got around to watching the second film, The New Land, over the weekend.

The New Land begins pretty much where The Emigrants leaves off. Karl-Oskar Nilsson (Max von Sydow), patriarch of a family including his wife Kristina (Liv Ullmann), their children, and Karl-Oskar's brother Robert (Eddie Axberg), has just reached Minnesota (still a territory and on the frontier at the time) and selected the plot of land that he and his family are going to settle. They don't even have a real house, and have to build one as well as do a bunch of other things before winter sets in. Also, since they're on the frontier, they have to worry about the Sioux in whose area the incoming immigrants are settling.

Robert, meanwhile, is chafing under his older brother's presence. Robert wanted to make his own fortune in America, which is why he and his friend Arvid (Pierre Lindstedt) eventually decide to leave and head west to California where, as far as they know, there's abundant gold. Also leaving, but not quite so far away, is Kristina's friend, the former prostitute Ulrika (Monika Zetterlund), who has married -- horror of horrors! -- a Baptist minister. (Recall from the first movie that part of the reason they all left was because they practiced a sect of Lutheranism that wasn't quite in step with the official Swedish Church. But still, it was a hell of a lot closer than the Baptists!)

Time passes, and eventually Robert returns from California, bringing a bunch of paper currency and saying that Arvid stayed behind. Karl-Oskar isn't so sure, since he feels Robert has always been a teller of tall tales. Robert relates a story that may or may not be real in what plays out as an extended dream sequence.

Life continues to be difficult as the Civil War comes, although Karl-Oskar is to Kristina's great relief declared unfit for duty; Kristina grows increasingly homesick and then learns she can no longer have children or else it will kill her; and the Sioux start raiding, presumably figuring that with the Civil War on, there won't be as many soldiers to fight the Sioux. Of course, we can look to the America of today to see what happened with all these events in the grand sweep of history, but as to exactly how it affects the individual dramas, that you'll have to watch.

When I blogged about the The Emigrants, I felt (although I see I didn't quite say it) that the material would have worked better as a TV miniseries: the movie develops at an extremely leisurely pace. This is even more so for The New Land. To be honest, I think I would have looked for a way to edit out Robert's gold rush sequence, or at least handle it much differently, since it doesn't quite work as a dream sequence. Other than that, there's really nothing wrong with the material other than the pacing. Where The Emigrants was shown in a version dubbed into English (which as I understand it was the way the movie was originally shown in the US), The New Land was shown mostly in Swedish (when the emigrant characters talk to each other), with some scenes in English when the Swedes are dealing with people born in America.

The two movies have been released together to DVD and Blu-Ray on a pricey Criterion Collection set.