Inga Lindström: Sehnsucht nach Marielund (2004)

Lena Lagerberg is a flight attendant and is friends with the pilot Malte Hallström. He wants them to rent an apartment together, but Lena isn’t ready yet. Just as they are discussing this, Lena gets a call from her sister Ingrid. Their father, Björn, has had a serious accident, and Ingrid asks Lena to come home at once. Reluctantly, Lena gets into her car, since she had never wanted to go back because of her bad memories. On the way, she passes the Marielund estate, which is connected to her dark secret. When she arrives home, it turns out that her father’s injury was not so serious after all and that her sister only wanted to lure her back. The architect Magnus Jacobsson and his partner Claes Sandberg have heard that Marielund is for sale, and Magnus is supposed to investigate on site whether the area would be suitable for a holiday-home development. He therefore travels there with his daughter Emma. His wife, Britta, has no time to look after Emma because she has an appointment in Gothenburg. While looking around Marielund, which he knows from his youth because they once spent a holiday there, he meets its owner, Elinor Frödin, who curtly ushers him out. He then heads to the holiday apartment he has rented from Björn and Ingrid at their farm. There, he meets Lena for the first time, and they immediately take to each other. But Lena has no wish to fall in love again, not since the fateful accident ten years ago. Magnus doesn’t give up and speaks to Elinor again, but gets nowhere, even though they both know she can no longer hold on to the estate because she cannot repay her bank loan. When Lena first meets her aunt Elinor again in town, Elinor walks away without a word. Magnus, who is there too, wonders what happened between them, but gets no answers. When Lena goes on a boat trip, she runs into Magnus again; they grow closer and kiss. Afterwards, she is so confused that she goes home, starts packing her things, and plans to leave. Her sister tries to persuade her to stop running away from her problems. Her father, too, realizes that Lena has fallen in love and tries to encourage her. When Lena goes to Magnus’s apartment, she finds the plans for renovating Marielund. She confronts him because he had not told her about his plans and had let her believe he was only there on vacation. He explains that this is no longer his plan for Marielund; instead, they will save it as it is. Lena’s family agrees with him, and in the process he learns that a strip of land along the lakeshore belongs not to Elinor but to Björn. Without direct access to the lake, the property is not nearly so valuable. Lena is about to run away again when Magnus anxiously asks whether anyone has seen his daughter Emma. She has not returned from a horseback ride. When her horse turns up alone, everyone begins searching for her. Lena and Magnus find her. Since she may have broken something, Magnus goes to get his car, leaving Lena and Emma behind. As a storm approaches, Lena takes Emma to shelter at Marielund. When she tries to give the soaked Emma a cloth so she won’t get cold, she discovers a damaged motorcycle underneath, connected to her bad memories. Magnus then takes Emma to the hospital, where it turns out she has a fractured ankle. He plans to return to Stockholm with her, where he can take better care of her. But someone has alerted Britta, who is waiting for her daughter at the farm. When Britta talks to Magnus, Lena gets the impression that they are still close. In fact, Britta has had a boyfriend for a year, something Magnus learns only by chance when he overhears a phone conversation. Britta also wants to move to Gothenburg to be with him. At last, what happened back then becomes clear: Lena was in a motorcycle accident with her boyfriend Stefan, Elinor’s only son, when a moose suddenly appeared in the road. Stefan died instantly. Lena blames herself and was never able to talk to Elinor about it. Elinor realizes how hopeless her situation is and sees no other way out than to end her life. She intends to drown herself in the lake, but Lena and Magnus manage to save her at the last moment. At last, Lena and Elinor can talk about what happened and forgive each other. Magnus has a suggestion for how to save Marielund. Lena says goodbye to Stefan once more at the cemetery, so she can put the past behind her, and leases Marielund together with Magnus to turn it into a holiday home. Emma also stays with her father, as she does not want to go to Gothenburg with her mother. At a small celebration, Lena and Magnus tell everyone about their plans, and Magnus also asks her if she will marry him.