Film novel of education The film of the classic Swedish cinema Ian Truell “This is Your Life” could be called “neorealistic” – it shows the social stratification leading to conflicts, everyday life, hard work and simple, if not squalid entertainment of small people – sawmill workers, farms, railway companies, the appeal of young people to socialist ideas in the hope of something better, drunkenness and prostitution, the priority of material over spiritual and spiritual, weakness and a secondary role of intrigue. But conflicts seem petty and easy to iron out, socialism empty talk, and the hard work seen with the ruthless naturalism of Swedish cinema nonetheless has its poetic appeal. In addition, the action “Here is your life” takes place in the 10s of the twentieth century, and not in the modern year of its creation. And also obvious is the aestheticism of Truwell, his fascination with the frame, picture, movement.
In Truell’s work, this film seems preparatory to the monumental dilogy Emigrants (1971) and Settlers (1972). The main role of the teenager Olaf in “This is Your Life” was played by the performer of one of the three central roles in the dilogy, Eddie Axberg. Appear in the film in 1966 and other actors involved later in the "Emigrants" and "Settlers" - Allan Edvall and Max von Zudov - the second, however, so far only in a short episode. If Here's Your Life is a film about a young man's search for his place under the scant northern sun, his growing up, the urban culture that he aspires to gradually penetrate his life, and which he must even be called upon to explore and share the real and the fake, then the dilogy is an epic account of the exodus of poor Swedish families to America in the mid-19th century. The “burden of dreams,” to use Werner Herzog’s phrase, and disappointment. In both cases, the director talks about the path, and the path implies the goal. This "burden of dreams" in "Here's Your Life" is shown in detached, sometimes hints, but the similarity of Olaf to Robert, the main dreamer of "Emigrants" and "Settlers", is quite significant.
And in the film “Here’s Your Life”, Truell, who himself was the cameraman and editor of these works, experimented with the picture: with a stop frame, with interspersed color cinema in black and white (to show memories), with an accelerated and slow rhythm, with the inlay of fragments of newsreels and silent cinema, with sharp editing – not so deliberately precipitous as in a dilogy where the life of nature, the life of the human mass, the life of individual characters and even the dead life of machines will be intertwined in a single pictorial dynamics.
Therefore, “neorealistic” is an epithet, in fact not very suitable for a film, which combines the formal search for the director and psychological drama, breaking through only suddenly and briefly through the detached contemplated pattern of everyday life, sometimes only symbolically, indirectly: for example, a naive silent film about Christian martyrs, seemingly ridiculed by the director, reveals the dreams of Olaf about revolutionary heroism, and the history of his relationship with an older woman, “walking”. Olivia not only, along with some other episodes, highlights the erotic side of growing up as a teenager, but also talks about the melodrama’s response to the prosaic and mentally sterile reality of the young Marxist.
7 out of 10