Stockholm, My Love is an intriguing and palate-cleansing work, ruminative and cerebral, with a literary feel, like an elegant European novella in translation. There are some tremendous reportage images created by both Mark Cousins and Christopher Doyle as cinematographers, showing the city’s clear, open, mostly unpopulated spaces. In the city-symphony tradition, it has something of Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital or Cousins’ own previous work, I Am Belfast. This is vernacular cinema, in its way, straightforwardly taking the camera for a walk.
Stockholm, My Love stars singer Neneh Cherry, presented in downbeat, daylit and unglamorised closeup, and the whole film could be seen as a reverse engineered video for her title song, which comes in at the very end. She plays an academic who had come to Stockholm to give a lecture on the city’s architecture, but has abandoned this plan, apparently in the grip of depression, and instead wanders Stockholm without speaking. A voiceover narrative gives us her thoughts in a pensive undertone. She addresses her dead father, who lived in the city, and another man to whom she feels a heavy, grief-laden debt due to an awful event in which she was involved the previous year. Her anxiety is numbed and displaced outwards, into the cityscape, as a way of managing her emotions and re-establishing her authority. It is a study of grief suppressed and a personality becalmed.
