Sara Lidman debuted as a writer in "a time that needed a literary little girl balloon," as she put it herself. It was then in the early 50s and the balloon Lidman became an institution in the Swedish public of the 20th century: the author, the national magistrate, the world conscience, the critics of the time.
But when Sara Lidman's life is to be portrayed, the risk of her being reduced to an anointed airing nevertheless returns. Åsa Faringer's interesting K-special The Life Award from 2018, about Lidman's year in South Africa in the 60s, changed reading from Lidman's diaries with interviews to a fairly monotonous story. In Gunilla Bredsky's documentary Sara with all her essence threatens something similar - despite the ambition to capture Sara Lidman "behind the political truths and the praise of the reviewers".
It is a difficult task. Sara Lidman's life and works are like several generations in one form: the educational journey, the class background, the village in Västerbotten, the peace issue, the political man, strikes and social responsibility. Like a Doris Lessing from the province: a literary supernova from the marshes that landed in Africa and Vietnam and raged against injustice standing in the middle of its own rhetorical spell.
Lidman went ashore and kingdom around and talked about the atomic bomb, the forest, the climate, the predatory operation on the nature of Norrland, the working conditions in the mines, the human dignity. She was often ahead of her time and constantly went along with this public assignment writing, novels, report books. Epic and emergency call.
She hinted that it damaged concentration and writing ability, that articles and pamphlets came in place of books that "perished" but that she never regretted that she could perceive that the world's equanimity is boundless.
Gunilla Bresky's documentary - which is Sara with Lidman - works with moods: still images, grainy films where Lidman speaks to crowds and world opinion and literary quotes that light up. "White fogs. Very cold. And the ground like a frozen psalm. "
The film takes off in the woods around Missenträsk, in the child Sara's encounter with a spruce that she must abandon to start school, become a writing, and then forces herself to pretend that she never loved the tree to manage to leave it. If you become firewood, I will laugh! When the Christmas tree dies, the power of language takes on a fateful weight.
It is a beautiful black-and-white entry into the story of a life that serves us a Swedish past, the story of a completely different public, but a renaissance of nostalgia cool enough - and can do so with Lidman's diaries as a source, avoiding the parade of interviewed voices. Instead Lidman's own voice, right to the end when the home service is a new word in the diary, super-realistic and melancholy.
However, I do not understand why Bresky is tempted to use a statistician (you only see Malin Ackerman from behind) who sits at Lidman's desk and looks out the window towards Missenträck's eternity. Not as embarrassing a lookalike-makeup actor as in Young Astrid about Astrid Lindgren last year, but the grip undermines the authority of Gunilla Bresky's worthwhile time travel.