A wife wins her unwitting freedom in the form of a camera before she finds herself behind the limits of her marriage. A husband refuses to look beyond himself, to see that the siren song no longer calls him. A marriage continues to spawn new lives, to add its frailty and its weight, its babies and its abuse into this world. Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments is this brand of simple story, though a curious film. This is not to say the story is simply redundant or (heavens, no) boring, but, as you might guess, its curiosity refreshes the “period piece slash woman’s picture” frame that marketing (in a backwards-thinking move) will do its best to make appealing—thus subverting that the film’s evident wonder with light (and its negative) balloons its niggling tendencies into something advanced and graceful. Troell moulds what some may see as clichés away from strictures by—it’s simple, yes—observing the familiar and attending to how it forms, or how it can form, the new.

Maria Heiskanen plays Maria Larsson with all the awe one can (and justifiably should) expect in a burdened-by-seven wife given life through an accordion-style large-format Contessa camera. Her eyes routinely widen and light out from under a shawl (or her sweaty brow, or the brim of a flat hat) as she stands her ground in her decades-long sparring match of a marriage. Mikael Persbrandt embodies her husband, Sigfrid (known as “Sigge”), as a blunt beast, all too often under the pall of drunkenness; as a relative giant forever hunched in his home, guarding some enigmatic source of hurt under his brawn and his smile. Maria bears his weight along with her own—she washes his back, withstands his infidelities, challenges his cowardice—for the privilege of her picture-making. Or so she grows.

The film begins in the trials of routine, the stubborn fight of a life hemmed by duty. Troell takes his time to show the family balance, to show how Maria might have loved (and does continue to love) Sigge despite his idiocy; how his charm earns its devotion in song and dance alongside how his brazen disregard for responsibility spurs Maria’s constant at-bay impulse to flee; how Maria’s choice to stay in the marriage, to labor with it, is an act of faith. Although the credits detail its mechanism in pieces before a (still small) whole, only after Sigge’s first eruption—after he knocks Maria’s temple bloody against a doorway—does the Contessa camera enters the picture. First Maria tries to sell the apparatus upon its appearance, unused for some time, in the belly of a drawer. But the man behind the counter, one Mr. Pedersen, brokers a different deal he needn’t think of, nor could Maria dream of, to open and salve a women who appears shuttered and broken by her life. He will “buy” the camera as long as she “tries it out” before relinquishing it and its opportunity (for agency, for beauty, for life) for good.

The camera figures the rest of the film, and how these three interact over time. It’s a powerful tool. For Maria and Pedersen, it’s a mode of belonging to the world. For Sigge, it’s a threat to his power-position as husband and father while also a means to lighten his load. For Jan Troell, the camera in the film is a mirror made to refract significance, not reflect it. At some junctures, Troell’s camera (of the film) labors frantically, nervy and unexpected, reframing without edits as if the image itself cowers in the face of the world, unsure of its footing or its hold on this space. It’s trying (and, as is natural, failing) to see everything. While these visual paroxysms often coincide with on-screen violence, their bustling is not restricted to such events; we see it in gleeful discovery, too. Each is an immediate labor to fix an image and each immediately fails—for the image, we know, has a life and a movement all its own. For Troell, like Maria and Pedersen, cannot sit with the world as it is: each sees past our forms and our roles, each looks to remake this world from our daily material. Each sees the liberty of the image to stand outside of time, indeed outside of simple representation. However, for all my will to concepts, Everlasting Moments is a concrete film (one might call it pragmatic storytelling) that resists abstraction.

All Troell’s “ideas” are indeed delicate details that cohere through dogged commitment. There’s a predictability to this kind of “art-house cinema” (and the film may be long), but in an age of brutality where caped and painted crusaders substitute for life, where tourist forgery wins awards, this tender picture reminds what uplift a worked-over film about people and our shadows may provide. And passionate, egalitarian concepts do surface. We see how the feminine can be celebrated, we see how a man can cower from himself while enraged. We see that the mother creates what the father cannot but dream of from his perch outside her womb. First she captures it, tenderly, then she puts it inside her dark spaces, lit from a softened hue of warmth, to cultivate its banks of life. Figures emerge from water, lines form inside a frame and, on the palimpsest pushed around its bath, a image emerges. It takes patience, and it’s a simple reminder, but this is it: life is born in light.