ELVIRA MADIGAN is not the most beautiful film ever made. It is not "perfect," or "absolutely gorgeous," or "exquisite," or any of the other things Bosley Crowther and his friends said about it. Director Bo Widerberg presents us with an unconvincing, confusing story fraught with technical flaws. In spots, he is brilliant. Single frames seem like French Impressionist paintings.

But if it is a film whose sole purpose is to be beautiful, Elvira Madigan fails miserably. Beauty must be a unified thing. Elvira Madigan is a patch-work film--pieced together in a sloppy fashion, giving us no single theme and no unified execution.

The story is a Swedish folk tale set in the 1880's. Tight-rope dancer Elvira Madigan (16-year-old Pia Degermark) and army officer Sixten Sparre (Tommy Berggen) fall in love, desert their families to live together in the summer of a Scandinavian countryside. They catch butterflies, roll in the flowers, move along from resort hotel to resort hotel. But they run out of money. And, trying to keep their identities secret, they are unable to find work. On the edge of starvation, Sparre kills Elvira, then himself.

WIDERBERG is not sure where he is going. He introduces one conflict, then drops it. Sparre's soldier friend tries to shame Elvira into leaving Sparre by telling her that Sixten's deserted wife tried to commit suicide. Elvira runs away, but 30 seconds later Sparre catches her, tells her that his friend's story was a lie, and everything is fine again.

Another plot problem is the reason for the suicide. Certainly, there were other alternatives to starvation. If Denmark was not safe, the two could have fled somewhere else. The plot may not be so important. Prettiness may be what Widerberg wants to get across, but to the audience the major motivation in the film is reduced to incredibility and that is a sad situation.

I WOULD suggest that Widerberg completely missed the point of the fable. He touched on it once or twice, but, in the main, he missed it. Elvira Madigan is not a story about two lovers who reject society and then die for their own love. It is a story of two lovers, loving ideally in a perfect setting, who find that their kind of love--the butterflies and the daisies and the wine and cheese--is not enough.

Their love is not apocalyptic. It floats on and on in the yellow light of ether. And what is hard reality? White tablecoths with blue and red anemones. Toes curling over a tightrope. Sharp silver wine in a wine glass.

What Elvira Madigan is about is not the wasting away of bodies, but the wasting away of love--even if (or because) that love is an ideal love. Who does not dream of it--fishing in the mirror fjords with a beautiful woman in a long white lace dress, the trout flopping in her lap, and you with your hat slouched over your eyes? Who does not dream of it?

Elvira Madigan tells us we should not dream of it--not on this earth anyway. It does not work. The spirit wastes away from boredom. We are men. We search for the apocalypse. And we find it at the barrel of a gun.

BUT there is music here, and beauty in the striving: "A blade of grass can be the world ...that the world is nothing without it." And Widerberg shows us the truth in his most masterful technical strokes. With his camera lens wide open, the depth of field is reduced, and all we can see is the blade of grass--Elvira's hair, and, in the end, the gray barrel of the pistol. The background--the rest of the world--is blurred: "When you look at the blade of grass, you can see it and nothing else. The rest of the world is blurred," says Sixten.

UNFORTUNATELY, Widerberg manages to blur other scenes he clearly does not want to blur. The wide-open lens causes objects to bounce in and out of focus, and the effect is annoying. The director has other technical problems. The cuts between scenes are sloppy; there are no smooth transitions.

But by far his greatest faults are outdoor scenes that are egregiously overexposed.

The story gives Widerberg a chance to play games in the trees and the grass and the flowers. At times he is successful. The mock gunfight between Sparre and his friend on a huge old tree is a beautiful tableau. When Elvira and Sparre walk up a road, the scene has the haunting quality of a Munch painting. But these two scenes are the only truly fine outdoor sequences that are properly exposed. In the rest, the greens are mercilessly washed out in white light; exposures are nearly always one to two stops off.

Indoors, however, it is another matter. The yellow afternoon light filtering in through the windows creates a perfect effect. Widerberg seems more interested when he gets inside. The scene in the first hotel room is shot with a huge lens, making an unusual and effective flattening out--with Elvira, Sparre, the lamp, and the bed all in the same plane. The restaurant sequence, with Miss Degermark's face glowing gold from the slanting sunlight, is another fine piece of work.

Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 is played throughout the film. Appropriate, yes. But after a while, it gets boring. The film's real music is in the language. Swedish sounds lyrical and Widerberg uses it well, especially in the exchange between Sparre and Elvira as Sixten holds the pistol to her head, ready to shoot her.

In the end, he does, but not in an embrace. She is running for butterflies in the field again. The gun goes off. Widerberg freeezs the frame. Elvira has caught the butterfly.