‘Love’: Venice Review

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

The second part of Dag Haugerud’s ongoing trilogy is Love, but indeed it could have had the same title as the other chapters – Sex, which premiered in Berlin this year, or the forthcoming Dreams. That only goes to suggest a thematic consistency that is very apparent in this ostensibly light, but impressively searching – and, in some themes, troubling – drama from the Norwegian writer-director, a late title in this year’s Venice Competition.

Contemplative slow pacing that is leisurely rather than laborious

Satisfying, thoughtful narrative and character play, together with engagingly candid performances from the ensemble headed by Andrea Braien Hovig will make this LGBTQIA+-themed number a promising prospect for admirers of mature, thoughtful relationship cinema – especially in the range that spans from Eric Rohmer to The Worst Person in the World. 

Exploring similar themes to Sex, while involving different characters, Love is set over several days one August in Oslo. The initial focus is on Marianne (Hovig), a hospital doctor specialising in urology. The drama begins in sobering fashion as Marianne delivers a diagnosis of prostate cancer to one of her patients, establishing a sometimes distressing theme of male physical vulnerability. Marianne stops off to see her friend Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsen), who is organising a commemorative event for the city, and talks a group through a statue that seemingly flies the flag for liberated erotic relations – although later, Heidi proves nowhere near as non-judgmental as this might suggest.

Heidi has fixed up the unattached Marianne with a possible date, Ole Harald (Thomas Gullestad), an amiable divorced geologist who lives on the nearby island of Nesodden. It’s on the Nesodden ferry that Marianne runs into her nurse colleague Tor (Tayo Citadella Jacobsen), a sexually confident gay man who tells her that the ferry is a prime venue for hook-ups on gay dating app Grindr. He himself has a tentative encounter on the boat with Bjorn (Lars Jacob Holm), a withdrawn older man; the two meet again later under troubling circumstances that draw them together in unlikely intimacy, empathetic rather than erotic. Meanwhile, while contemplating whether to get down to earth with her geologist, Marianne finds herself exploring a surprise distraction on Tinder. 

With contemplative slow pacing that is leisurely rather than laborious, and Cecilie Semec’s clean, luminous camerawork equally making the most of Oslo’s harbour area and the cast’s characterful, attentive faces, Love is a drama about choice, chance and the carpe diem imperative, especially in the face of illness and emotional distress. While the script can be unsettling in its frank presentation discussion of male oncological issues, the drama’s gently upbeat warmth emerges over its length, leading up to a surprisingly uplifting rooftop music interlude.

Hovig is very affecting as the serious, thoughtful woman – the ‘sensible one’ in this ensemble – who realises that sometimes life demands you throw caution to the winds, while Citadella Jacobsen is winning as the self-contained guy whose narcissistic swagger peels away to show a compassion that is not just a health worker’s professional skill.