‘Love’ Review: Dag Johan Haugerud Makes An Entirely Believable Film About Decent People, Everyday Life And … Love – Venice Film Festival

Sex is never just sex, says Bjorn (Lars Jacob Holm), a middle-aged psychologist Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen) meets on the ferry between central Oslo and Nakholmen, the island where they happen to have neighboring houses. Tor, a nurse who works with cancer patients, looks sceptical.

Tor has had a lot of sex, often generated by Grinder and occasionally on this ferry; it’s a thrill, he tells his colleague Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig), to do a search for the nearest person on the app and look up to see the person on your screen looking right back at you. Marianne gives it a try on Tinder and meets a man who tells her he is married. Does he feel guilty? Yes, extremely guilty! “You’ve ruined it a bit, now,” he says accusingly. Bjorn was right. Sex is never just sex.

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Dag Johan Haugerud’s discursive film is a companion piece to his earlier Sex. Once again, his protagonists are middle-class professionals groping for a way to live that sits well with them, which became tiresomely self-indulgent in Sex. Love, funnily enough, is much more lively, a better mix between conversations, revelations of character and wider views of the city and the sea that imply that Haugerud’s interest is much broader than just the doings of his cast of characters. All of Oslo is here, even if the focus is on people talking.

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Those characters, some more likable than others but all entirely believable, rub gently against each other in a constant play of tensions and doubts. Marianne is a consultant urologist who seems quiet, self-contained and admits to being relatively indifferent to sex. She doesn’t want a partner; she is content. That frustrates her friend Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsen); for reasons she could not formulate if asked, she wants Marianne to meet a man.

There is no question that Haugerud has his own ax to grind; he keeps throwing alternatives to convention in his characters’ ways, nudging them to take the paths less followed. He is not above having a bit of fun with them, however. Heidi, for example, is a muddle of smug married monogamist and defender of diversity, completely without self-awareness and funny because of it.

Charged with organizing centenary celebrations for Oslo’s Town Hall, she tries to convince her colleagues that the stolid 1920s friezes depicting Norwegian life on the building’s exterior are actually subtly coded representations of sexual diversity. Two women playing with children? A same-sex couple, obviously. A trio of burghers, showing two men and one woman? A polyamorous threesome in the making! Her fellow municipal officers try not to look dubious. “That went badly,” Heidi says afterwards.

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For Marianne, however, Heidi is an original thinker who, at the very least, prods her to do other things besides work. She agrees when her friend invites her to meet a twice-divorced geologist Ole (Thomas Gullestad) she considers a suitable prospect. To Marianne’s own surprise, she feels so drawn to Ole’s own single-minded passion — rocks — that she gives him a quick pat on the backside when nobody is looking, astonished at her own forwardness. He invites her to dinner. Mulling over a three-dimensional model of Oslo’s mineral strata, their lips meet. They are moving inexorably towards boxed-in coupledom.

Complications loom: a former wife living next door whose drinking is clearly problematic, children who prefer him to their mother, an incompatible eagerness to be a husband. If only, she says to him, they could have done it Tor’s way: a rendezvous on that peculiarly aphrodisiac ferry. At the same time, Tor is finding unexpected joy in another kind of relationship. He is yet to call it love, but it certainly isn’t just sex. In fact, it doesn’t involve sex at all.

Haugerud says he consults his chosen cast during the writing process, after which they rehearse the final script that reflects their questions and contributions. The result is dialogue that is carefully judged and balanced but has the idiosyncratic ring of individual voices and real conversation.

Hovig is magnetic as the serene Marianne, while Jacobsen has a vital warmth and energy that works in counterpoint to her reserve. When they crack open these personae to reveal other selves and feelings bottled up inside them, they continue to ring true; none of the drama, which is entirely centered in the characters’ inner conflicts, feels contrived. Call it Scandi blanc: a film about decent people, everyday life and love.

Title: Love
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Distributor: Maren Kroymann
Director-screenwriter: Dag Johan Haugerud
Cast: Andrea Bræin Hovig, Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen, Marte Engebrigtsen, Lars Jacob Holm, Thomas Gullestad, Marian Saastad Ottesen, Morten Svartveit
Running time: 1 hr 59 mins

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