‘Love’ Review: A Charming and Intelligent Norwegian Dramedy to Win Over Hearts and Minds

There’s a lot to love about Love (or Kjaelighet), but the generic English title is not one of them. That handle will get this confused with works by Gaspar Noé and Judd Apatow, among others, and could potentially delay viewers finding it through search engines. Which would be a real shame, because Norwegian writer-director Dag Johan Haugerud’s dramedy, which premiered at Venice, is a refreshing delight.

Honest, thoughtful, and daringly talky as it observes modern dating customs in the age of apps, it deserves further exposure beyond the festival circuit. The second part of a thematically but not narratively linked trilogy — its predecessor Sex played in Berlin, and Dreams is yet to come — it’s sure to find traction among viewers who groove to upscale, nuanced Scandi fare like The Worst Person in the World, the sort of romantic schmooze-fests that French cinema excels at and Richard Linklater’s Before series.

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In contemporary Oslo, Marianne (Andrea Braein Hovig) is a physician specializing in urology, which means we first meet her breaking the bad news to a stunned patient that he has prostate cancer. Nurse Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen) is in the room at the time, and spots that the patient doesn’t seem to have absorbed what Marianne just told him. He makes a point of seeking the man out to offer clarification. The scene subtly underscores the point that for all of Marianne’s scientific understanding of men’s plumbing and biology, she doesn’t always understand how their minds work — something Tor believes himself to be more conversant with as a gay man.

The two colleagues run into one another on the ferry to an island that’s part of the wider Oslo conurbation. Tor is living there temporarily for the summer; Marianne is heading to a dinner party that’s actually something of a blind date so she can meet the host, Ole Harald (Thomas Gullestad). He’s a geologist who, like nearly all middle-aged single people, has some baggage, in the shape of a young daughter and an alcoholic ex, Solveig (Marian Saastad Ottesen), who live next door to make shared custody easier.

On the way over, Tor explains how he uses Grindr to scout out potential lovers and often finds himself having trysts on the ferry itself, with guys who cover the whole gambit of male sexuality, from straight men into cruising to out ones looking for a life partner. Tor’s happy embrace of casual sex seems to linger with Marianne, and she finds herself emboldened to touch Ole Harald on the butt, signaling her attraction to him. The gesture sort of works, but things move much slower for these heterosexual folks. It will take another date or so, and lots of in-depth conversation about circumstances and life goals, before Marianne and Ole Harald will finally go to bed. Nevertheless, her curiosity about app-assisted hookups is piqued. In between initially meeting and spending her first night with Ole Harald, she uses Tinder to find a quickie partner, an experience that doesn’t quite play out as planned although she enjoys the sex.

Meanwhile, with the sort of gentle symmetry that makes the film so engaging, we see Tor starting to rethink his commitment to no-strings shagging. On the ferry one night he meets Bjorn (Lars Jacob Holm), a handsome daddy a good 20 years older than Tor who has barely ever used Grindr before. Bjorn shyly backs out of having sex on the boat, but opens up to easygoing Tor in conversation. Some time later, Tor spots him at the hospital clinic where he and Marianne work and notes Bjorn’s agitation over bad news. From there, an at-first-nonsexual relationship develops that brings out Tor’s more domestic, tender side, an aspect that’s clearly helped him to be an excellent nurse.

The unfussy camera setups by DP Cecilie Semec, lit so as to benefit from the low-angle sunlight of Nordic summer nights, unfurl in long languorous takes that just sit back and let the actors do all the work. Fortunately, the cast here is well up to the job, and the dialogue, especially between Hovig and Jacobsen, have a charming musicality about them, like bright duets. Along the way, the film makes some interesting points about friendship as well as romance, especially when it comes to studying the reaction of Marianne’s art historian friend Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsen), who is scandalized by Marianne’s adventures in zipless fucks. Love, to quote that woozy old ballad, is indeed a many-splendored thing that takes many forms — a multiplicity that Love the film is quietly alive to.