‘Love’: Venice Review

Dir. Dag Johan Haugerud. Norway 2024. 119 minutes.  

The second a part of Dag Haugerud’s ongoing trilogy is Love, however certainly it might have had the identical title as the opposite chapters – Intercourse, which premiered in Berlin this 12 months, or the forthcoming Desires. That solely goes to counsel a thematic consistency that may be very obvious on this ostensibly mild, however impressively looking out – and, in some themes, troubling – drama from the Norwegian writer-director, a late title on this 12 months’s Venice Competitors.

Contemplative gradual pacing that’s leisurely reasonably than laborious

Satisfying, considerate narrative and character play, along with engagingly candid performances from the ensemble headed by Andrea Braien Hovig will make this LGBTQIA+-themed quantity a promising prospect for admirers of mature, considerate relationship cinema – particularly within the vary that spans from Eric Rohmer to The Worst Particular person within the World. 

Exploring comparable themes to Intercourse, whereas involving totally different characters, Love is ready over a number of days one August in Oslo. The preliminary focus is on Marianne (Hovig), a hospital physician specialising in urology. The drama begins in sobering vogue as Marianne delivers a analysis of prostate most cancers to one in every of her sufferers, establishing a typically distressing theme of male bodily vulnerability. Marianne stops off to see her good friend Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsen), who’s organising a commemorative occasion for the town, and talks a bunch by a statue that seemingly flies the flag for liberated erotic relations – though later, Heidi proves nowhere close to as non-judgmental as this would possibly counsel.

Heidi has mounted up the unattached Marianne with a potential date, Ole Harald (Thomas Gullestad), an amiable divorced geologist who lives on the close by island of Nesodden. It’s on the Nesodden ferry that Marianne runs into her nurse colleague Tor (Tayo Citadella Jacobsen), a sexually assured homosexual man who tells her that the ferry is a chief venue for hook-ups on homosexual courting app Grindr. He himself has a tentative encounter on the boat with Bjorn (Lars Jacob Holm), a withdrawn older man; the 2 meet once more later beneath troubling circumstances that draw them collectively in unlikely intimacy, empathetic reasonably than erotic. In the meantime, whereas considering whether or not to get all the way down to earth along with her geologist, Marianne finds herself exploring a shock distraction on Tinder. 

With contemplative gradual pacing that’s leisurely reasonably than laborious, and Cecilie Semec’s clear, luminous camerawork equally profiting from Oslo’s harbour space and the forged’s characterful, attentive faces, Love is a drama about alternative, probability and the carpe diem crucial, particularly within the face of sickness and emotional misery. Whereas the script may be unsettling in its frank presentation dialogue of male oncological points, the drama’s gently upbeat heat emerges over its size, main as much as a surprisingly uplifting rooftop music interlude.

Hovig may be very affecting as the intense, considerate lady – the ‘wise one’ on this ensemble – who realises that typically life calls for you throw warning to the winds, whereas Citadella Jacobsen is profitable because the self-contained man whose narcissistic swagger peels away to point out a compassion that’s not only a well being employee’s skilled ability.