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I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

You say the Andante from the 21 Piano, you add, it's the Elvira Madigan. As you know, the nick does not come from Mozart times. It is due to a Swedish movie made by Bo Widerberg in 1967: Elvira Madigan; the Andante was its leitmotiv, played again and again, with the coming of each love scene. Other parts of that movie were scored with fragments from Vivaldi's concertos: the first movements from the Summer, and from L'Amoroso.Maybe the association between the movie and the 21 Piano is not fortunate. Or is it? The Andante is divine, and it deserved a cinematic pair: a movie to render the same nobility, the same bouquet with nuances of discretion and delicacy, in the same dosage. But Mozart is unique! Many people today haven't seen Elvira Madigan. But forty years ago, this movie was loved. And those who watched it should remember the childish tune that starts and ends the movie: it's Den blomstertid nu kommer, an old Swedish song, celebrating the coming of summer. It was composed by Israel Kolmodin in 1695. Then, in 1819, Johan Olof Wallin published a new version. Pupils in Sweden sing it each year in the last day of school.The story in the movie is real. In 1889 a Swedish aristocrat, Count Sixten Sparre, felt in love for a young tight rope dancer, Elvira Madigan. Sparre was married and had two children, but his passion proved overwhelming. He left his family, deserted from the military (he was a lieutenant in the Swedish army) and ran with Elvira in Denmark. They lived a passionate love for several months, being constantly on the run. After spending all the money they had, overdone by hunger, in impossibility to get lodging any more, they didn't find other solution than death. Sparre shot Elvira and then shot himself. They were buried together and, as it happens, their story overpassed reality and entered the realm of legend: one of those famous romantic loves in which the second part of the nineteenth century excelled. Their graves became a pilgrimage place for young couples. Later Johan Lindström Saxon would put the story in a ballad, the Doggerel about the Love and Cruel Death of the lovely Evira Madigan.No wonder this story attracted the filmmakers. The first Elvira Madigan was made in Sweden in 1943. The other two Elvira Madigans came on the screen in 1967. One of them was produced in Denmark, the other was the Swedish movie (featuring Pia Degermark in the titular role), and this version became famous (and gave the nickname to the Andante from the 21 Piano).Watching this Swedish version from 1967 makes obvious some reasons of its fame. The musical background is great; the scenes give the impression of coming from the brush of one of the French masters of the nineteenth century; and generally each sonic or visual detail is treated with care. It is a feast for the ear, and for the eye.However the movie attracted also critical reviews. It was noted that the final (though a real story) lacked artistic motivation. It is not enough that it really happened; it should also be convincing on the screen. After all, as someone exclaimed after watching the movie, why shooting yourself when hungry and penniless? Steal a chicken instead, and leave the serious decisions for the next day. And generally, the story of these two lovers, as it entered the legend, lacks consistence. Much more likely the reality was about morbid obsession on the part of Sparre, while Elvira wanted to escape the misery of circus life and find a husband no matter what.I think these critics miss the point. The movie is not recreating a novel, to be concerned too much about the likeliness of the story, or about the consistence of the decisions taken by the heroes. It is a ballad, playing a love story like a fairy tale. Love in all purity, with no connection with any earthly reality, unaware of any moral issue, of any obligation. A meditation about the ephemeral nature of love: as beautiful and short as summer in Sweden is. The tragic outcome is told from the very beginning and then is suggested in each scene: each moment has the awareness that summer will end before long, happiness will not last. You see, it is the only awareness of the heroes. They celebrate the beauty of each moment while they know that soon it'll be over.Love, as beautiful, careless, and ephemeral, as the days of summer, as the butterfly caressed by Elvira in the final scene.

This is a very pretty movie (apart from the occasionally out of focus shots)--with exquisite scenery. That, combined with the background music, it looked almost like an extended music video! The music, by the way, was Mozart and Vivaldi (2 of my favorites) but it was often too loud--dominating the action on the screen. It is VERY unusual to see a movie before the 1980s that does this, so the movie artistically took some risks. The negative for me was the story itself--I just didn't care much for the characters (especially when I later found that he left his wife AND kids for the lovely Elvira) and it was not especially deep story. It's a decent film but won't change your life.

Sorry, I have to include a Spoiler because the ending is one thing I really hated about this filmI found Elvira Madigan to be very distasteful. I saw it during its first U.S. release in - what? - 1968 or '69. Instead of being beautiful and romantic, I found it unpleasant. I know that now it is a cliché to show vomiting in movies, but this had the first explicit upchucking I had ever seen on the screen. Also, I never understood what was so `romantic' about a man killing his lover and himself. The last thing I have against this film is its now permanent attachment to the concerto that is used on its soundtrack. It is typical to find this citation: Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major ("Elvira Madigan") K. 467. Most classical musical nicknames were appended after the work's appearance and without the composer's knowledge or permission, but this is the only one I know of that didn't became standard until 200 years after composition. It is absurd that this little remembered movie should have its fame extended by an undeserved attachment to a musical masterpiece.

One of the simple pleasures of life is to sit in a darkened theater and have a film capture your soul, not as a single person, but as the whole sigh of the room. I saw this in 1967 in Boston, in a makeshift theater. This was at the height of the flower revolution, when Boston was the intellect of the emerging 'counter' culture.This film found a hungry audience -- we and it fed each other. At the same time down the road were Hollywood projects on (what we though was) the same notion: passion before everything, and the purer the passion the clearer the beauty. Life matters less than living. 'Bonnie and Clyde,' and 'The Graduate' seemed slick and pale in comparison then and more so now.For decades, I recalled many of the images:-- the raspberries and cream (which she bought by selling her image)-- her luminescence, her dainty vomit, the fish in her skirt, the attentive query about eggs-- the fainting when she is discovered by innocence (which we ourselves did at the very beginning through the same child's eyes)-- 'There are times when you don't question the cost'and of course:-- the release of the butterfly, and the reluctance of the filmmaker to let us release the image.This film succeeds because it is so simple, but its simplicity is not accidental. The notion of equating Elvira with the music by bringing the musicians into the story shows extraordinary skill. I can think of no other case where a classic piece of music is renamed because of a film.At the time, I recall great discussion of the book Sixten carried around. Like Hamlet's book, it 'mattered,' but I have forgotten its importance. I remember much in the underground press about the self-referential nature: the passion and beauty of the characters and so with the film: the simple commitment to no plan of both: and the accepting of the consequences by both for meditative obsession. But another of the simple pleasures of life is to live long enough to see two of ourselves: the recalled initial engagement with the film and the current one. I wish this pleasure on all of you. Oh how we have all changed. (I strongly suspect that no person who was not there will find any traction with this film, but perhaps others like it.)And watching this now, I discover I'm more of an 'In the Mood for Love' kind of guy. Same ethic. Same commitment to enter the unknown. But the passion if stronger is more diffuse and less selfish. I recommend seeing both films. Let me know.