Here is the second of Norwegian film-maker and novelist Dag Johan Haugerud’s seductive trilogy about affairs of the heart and mind, set in Oslo. (It comes between Sex and Dreams.) It is a thoroughly grownup and absorbing drama, acted with such sympathy and warmth, a ruminative and exploratory movie of ideas, and one that pays its audience the compliment of treating them as intelligent beings. Love is about a familiar question: can straight people learn from or even absorb the open and polygamous approach to sex that appears to come easier to gay people (and perhaps younger people of all sexualities), perhaps specifically gay men? Or is that idea stereotypical and naive?
Andrea Braein Hovig plays Marianne, a urology consultant whose job it is to give bad news to a succession of men about their prostate cancer. She is single (though her past romantic life remains a mystery); her best friend, Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsen), tries to set her up with a divorced friend. But Marianne finds herself restive with the whole monolithic idea of dating and relationships and she is fascinated with what her nurse Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen) tells her about his own life. After work, she encounters him on their commuter ferry and he candidly tells her he uses Grindr to set up exciting, ephemeral encounters on this very craft.
But it is Tor who is to develop serious feelings for one of his hook-ups – a urology patient at the hospital – and Marianne who experiments with openness, which is to upset others who feel obscurely threatened. Perhaps some of the characters are a bit too good to be true, and Marianne’s shrewd warning to Tor about immediately developing a “nurse” relationship to a partner is something whose implications are not heeded. Haugerud has something of Eric Rohmer, and perhaps a little more of Hong Sang-soo; a readiness to simply talk, and talk and talk some more. It’s surprisingly cinematic.
• Oslo Stories Trilogy: Love is in UK and Irish cinemas from 15 August.
