‘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 Goals. That solely goes to recommend a thematic consistency that could be very obvious on this ostensibly gentle, however impressively looking – 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 fairly 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 Individual within the World. 

Exploring related themes to Intercourse, whereas involving totally different characters, Love is about 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 style as Marianne delivers a analysis of prostate most cancers to certainly one of her sufferers, establishing a generally distressing theme of male bodily vulnerability. Marianne stops off to see her buddy Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsen), who’s organising a commemorative occasion for town, and talks a bunch by way of 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 recommend.

Heidi has mounted up the unattached Marianne with a attainable 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 main venue for hook-ups on homosexual relationship 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 He himself has a tentative encounter on the boat with Bjorn (Lars Jacob Holm), a withdrawn older man; the 2 meet once more later below troubling circumstances that draw them collectively in unlikely intimacy, empathetic fairly than erotic.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 fairly than laborious, and Cecilie Semec’s clear, luminous camerawork equally taking advantage of Oslo’s harbour space and the solid’s characterful, attentive faces, Love is a drama about alternative, likelihood 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 could be very affecting as the intense, considerate girl – the ‘smart one’ on this ensemble – who realises that generally 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.