Jerusalem

Billie August offers a compelling visualization of Selma Lagerlöf's novel "Jerusalem." The narrative evokes the evangelical millennialism that in 1896 compelled Swedes from the village of Nas to leave their families and their land for Ottoman Jerusalem to await the second coming of Jesus. The austere and beautiful cold of Sweden contrasts to the austere and beautiful heat of Jerusalem; the stoicism demanded by the weather in the north is tested by the violence of disease, aridity and social ostracism in the south. These two disparate sites frame the love story of the protagonists, Gertrude (Maria Bonnevie) and Ingmar (Ulf Friberg), whose devotion to one another transcends conventional romance. The characters are complex. Their distinct weaknesses (Gertrude's febrile and pious imagination and Ingmar's passion for his land) thicken their mutual strengths—unselfish empathy and candid honesty. The villain in the piece is Hellgum (Sven-Bertil Taube), the born-again evangelical preacher who returns to his Swedish homeland from America as a dark shadow praying upon rifts in the religious fabric of the community. Selma Lagerlöf was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. "Jerusalem," published in Sweden in 1901, depicted recent events with resonant sympathy. Billie August has succeeded in recovering that same compassion in his rendering of a now remote historical moment. Nevertheless, Hellgum's evangelical megalomania and the Holy City's violence so powerfully described in the film seem all too contemporary. Unfortunately, the simple human goodness also so powerfully represented in "Jerusalem" now seems quaintly out-of-date.