review for A Song for Martin on AllMovie

Although it's a pretty straightforward Alzheimer's drama, the Danish/Swedish A Song for Martin comes at the subject matter from a different enough angle to be distinctive. Instead of the protagonist watching his or her spouse of 30 years deteriorate into a stranger, these two are newlyweds -- while still being in their fifties or sixties. In fact, this cellist and her acclaimed composer recently left their longtime spouses to be together. Ordinary film morality might make his subsequent diagnosis some kind of punishment for their sinful extramarital longing, but director Bille August has the utmost respect for his characters' decisions. In fact, there's not a moment in the dialogue when Barbara (Viveka Seldahl) regrets having left a healthy husband to be with a sick one. And since the dialogue is sometimes too on-the-nose, those feelings would be there if that's the message we were supposed to take. Barbara followed love, and her love doesn't waver under the enormous burdens of her new husband's illness. This isn't to say she copes perfectly -- in fact, her coping is often quite imperfect. It's just to say she could be no less a wife to him if they'd been married since they were teenagers. The creative individual losing his artistic skills is a pretty familiar window into Alzheimer's, and sometimes the film plays a bit like "Alzheimer's greatest hits," with the incidents following the well-documented behavioral patterns we've seen in other films. But the leads play their roles with a deep believability, Seldahl walking the line between weariness and determination, and Sven Wollter fixing that expression of slack panic that comes with losing your bearings. They may be walking down a sadly familiar path, but A Song for Martin reminds us that each couple experiences its sorrows in their own personal way.