MOVIE REVIEW: Love is All You Need
Love is All You Need Love is All You Need
LOVE IS ALL YOU NEED
DIRECTOR: Susanne Bier
CAST: Pierce Brosnan, Trine Dyrholm, Kim Bodnia, Molly Blixt Egeland
CLASSIFICATION: 13 LNS
RUNNING TIME: 116 minutes
RATING: ***
If for some reason you were hoodwinked into seeing The Big Wedding, maybe it’s time for a small one: the slight, modestly absorbing Love Is All You Need trots out some conceits and conventions similar to its overstuffed Hollywood cousin, but does so with such tenderness that it feels like a healing balm.
Film-maker Bier won an Oscar a few years ago for In a Better World, her haunting meditation on violence. She positions Love Is All You Need as a 180-degree turn into romantic comedy, but there aren’t many laugh-out-loud moments to be had here.
Ida (Dyrholm), a middle-aged hairdresser in Copenhagen, is grappling with crises both medical and marital when she embarks on a trip to Italy for the wedding of her daughter, Astrid.
Philip (Brosnan), a widowed fruit-and-vegetable magnate, is making the same journey.
Love Is All You Need centres mostly on the busy wedding weekend – which transpires in an elegantly shabby villa in a picturesque seaside town – and the emotions that roil beneath the happy surface, having to do with betrayal, unrequited love, regret, and sexual orientation.
With its surfeit of brightly coloured rooms and Bier’s leitmotif of photographing her protagonists on their separate terraces, Love Is All You Need has all the hallmarks of a classic romantic farce.
But the film-maker doesn’t have a gift for screwball comedy, instead observing the missed signals, chance encounters and explosive outbursts with the seasoned eye of an innate dramatist. The result is a film that looks intimate, but feels oddly diffident and removed.
As Ida, Dyrholm is all blonde hair and bright blue eyes, a façade that gives way in the film’s most disarming and touching moments.
Brosnan plays the saturnine Philip with the pained expression of a man trying to pass a kidney stone without anyone noticing.
There are few surprises in Love Is All You Need. Like the lemons that appear throughout the film as a visual and thematic motif, Love Is All You Need embraces the bitter with the sweet. Its idea of escapist romantic fantasy is to recognise the most sour of life’s circumstances and simply make lemonade. – Washington Post
If you liked In a Better World, you will like this.