‘Sun’ Offers a Warm Look at Love

Colin Nutley’s “Under the Sun” casts a lovely spell, as warm and seductive as its summertime setting, but be prepared to yield to the leisurely pace of its locale and time--rural Sweden in 1956.

As captivating as this foreign-language film Oscar nominee is, it is easy to imagine it coming in at something less than its two-hour running time with no loss of effect. Nonetheless, Nutley is to be admired for caring so much about his people that he wants us to empathize with their lives and their world as much as he does.

Rolf Lassgard’s Olof is a big lug, a beefy, reddish-blond-haired, 40-year-old farmer who has lived alone on his isolated farm since the death of his mother nearly a decade earlier. Loneliness has at last driven this shy, sweet-natured man to take the bold step of advertising for a live-in housekeeper with the clear implication that he’s looking for a wife. Astoundingly, one of the two replies he receives is from a 34-year-old woman who encloses a snapshot, showing her to be a smiling, attractive blond.

Ellen Lind (Helena Bergstrom) is even more impressive in person. She arrives wearing a pale blue suit--with a matching hat--that shows off a terrific figure. She’s a pleasant, self-possessed woman undaunted by the prospect of shaping up a charming but primitive farmhouse that has largely been unused and undusted for a decade. At once tactful and efficient, she not surprisingly inspires Olof to fall for her hard and fast.

Her arrival inspires in Olof’s best friend Erik (Johan Widerberg) a volatile mix of lust, suspicion and jealousy. Erik says he’s 27 but looks and acts like a skinny 17-year-old. A sailor who’s been to America, he helps Olof around the farm, works as a part-time gravedigger, drives a new Ford convertible, wears his hair in a ducktail and brags of his sexual conquests. Erik cannot imagine Ellen accepting Olof’s job offer other than for the purpose of trying to clean him out. With Olof’s feelings for Ellen growing ever deeper and Erik, a man who views women as good for only one thing, feeling ever more thwarted, trouble may be brewing for the farmer, a trusting but not stupid man. In adapting H.E. Bates’ short story “The Little Farm,” Nutley, an Englishman working in Sweden, and his co-writers, Johanna Hald and David Neal, play out the plot beautifully, eliciting concern that Olof not get hurt--and not Ellen either.

Nutley, who also directed two other Oscar-nominated Swedish films, “House of Angels” and “The Last Dance,” engages his actors fully in catching us up in the fate of Olof and Ellen. Cinematographer Jens Fischer and composer Paddy Maloney help Nutley immeasurably in creating a warm and inviting world, and in telling a story with so much good humor and honest emotion.

Unrated. Times guidelines: some sex, blunt language, mature themes.

‘Under the Sun’

Rolf Lassgard: Olof

Helena Bergstrom: Ellen

Johan Widerberg: Erik

A Shadow Distribution release of a Sweetwater production in cooperation with Svensk Film Industri, SVT Goteborg/Drama, Film i Vast and Nordisk Film and TV-fond. Producer-director Colin Nutley. Screenplay by Nutley, in collaboration with Johanna Hald and David Neal; based on the short story “The Little Farm” by H.E. Bates. Cinematographer Jens Fischer. Editor Perry Schaffer. Music Paddy Maloney. Costumes Camilla Thulin. Art director Bengt Froderberg. In Swedish, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes.

*

Exclusively at the Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869; and the Rancho Niguel, Crown Valley Parkway at Greenfield, Laguna Niguel, (949) 831-0446.