Today, the Swede Sven Nykvist is remembered as one of the greatest cinematographers of all time. A director of photography who shot more than a hundred films, among them all the most important films by compatriot Ingmar Bergman, and when the great Swedish auteur did not win a single Oscar, Nykvist managed to do it for the camera of the films “Cries and Whispers” and “Fanny and Alexander”. Nykvist himself made several films, and probably the most famous of them is “The Ox”, a drama set in the middle of the 19th century in which he literally assembled the Swedish acting dream team. Starring Stellan Skarsgard and Ewa Fröling as a couple of impoverished Swedish peasants, Helge and Elfrida Roos.
They are literally starving during the winter and Helge is desperate because he doesn’t know how he will feed his one-year-old daughter when an ox owned by the nobleman on whose land they live wanders into their house. In a fit of despair and helplessness, Helge will kill the ox, dismember its meat and hide it so that they will have something to eat during the winter, but the knowledge that he stole something and committed a sin will immediately begin to haunt him. As in the saying that the stolen is cursed, so for Helge the stolen ox will prove to be a real curse, not only in terms of Christian morality and Protestant ethics, but the crime he committed will also be paid for in terms of court punishment. And what punishments!
Regardless of the fact that Helge only wanted meat to feed the child, no one will have mercy for him and at the persuasion of the local priest (Max von Sydow) he will confess what he did in court, hoping that the great man (Lennart Hjülstrom) will have mercy and forgive him, which should lead to a mitigation of the sentence. However, the story will not unfold as the pastor had convinced him, and we will follow the unimaginably sad and tragic fate of these people until the end. “Oxen” was even nominated for an Oscar, and Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann appear in supporting roles. The role of Helge was also one of the key ones for the excellent Skarsgard, and “The Ox” is also a film that brilliantly shows what the lives of average Swedes looked like in the sixties of the 19th century.
We can see here that the system there did not move away from classical feudalism and for every big man or landowner in the villages and the new social elite or industrialists in the cities, there were tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of paupers, or impoverished peasants and workers. At that time, Sweden was a poor country and one of the leading European countries in terms of emigration, and many poor Swedes who were literally starving at home decided to seek their fortune in America. “Oxen” is a film that brilliantly shows not only the class differences among the population, but also the complete misunderstanding between the classes, i.e. how the rich simply cannot understand how starving and miserable peasants live.
These landowners behave as if it doesn’t concern them at all that this army of poor and hungry people is literally dying, especially during the winter months, and the fact that Helge stole the ox out of complete helplessness and despair is completely irrelevant to the landowner. I am always fascinated by Swedish films set in a historical period when we see how in just three or four generations this country in the north of Europe has developed from one of the poorest to one of the most advanced and modern countries. A country that is known today for its solidarity among the population and a country that has given the world a handful of fantastic films such as this one.