“I hate ’love’ in my own language,” says the Norwegian music artist and novelist Jenny Hval in the title track from her album The Practice of Love. “It contains the entire word honesty inside it, which makes it sound… purified. The word love comes in the way of love.” For Norwegian novelist and film director Dag Johan Haugerud, honesty is — in a sensibly framed, patiently unspooled, and inconsequentially light way — the only recuperation for the word and its baggage.
Even if one isn’t naturally drawn to Hval’s sharpened skepticism, her clarity gives the lie to the assuredness of Haugerud’s project. Love is one part of a thematic trilogy, shot and released in quick succession, appearing across 12 months of the past festival season. Like Kieslowski’s polyphonic Colors films, the idea is to see what happens when traditional values are re-approached through a narrative fashioned out of contemporary coincidences. The generalities of the titles “love,” “sex,” and “dreams” are useful to Haugerud as expectations that, when used as the backdrop for an up-to-date portrait, produce narratives that do not follow typical rules.
But his films do not tread on much unfamiliar ground; they are designed to be pleasant. They are shot like over-color-corrected travel ads and scored with saccharine muzak. In their pitch at saying something about what’s new, if anything, about our relationships to these universal concepts, there is an ingratiating and welcoming atmosphere. In contrast to melodrama, this lower temperature might be seen as a virtue: here is a filmmaker who isn’t attempting to catch his audience off-guard, and who wants to propose a happy compromise of these topics, rather than their usual, uncomfortable failures.
Love has two protagonists, Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig) and Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen), who work as a professional duo: she is the urologist who delivers bad news, and he is the nurse who acclimates each patient to their new reality. After they meet outside of work on a ferry between their professional base of Oslo and the warm retreat of Nesodden, they become confidantes as they each navigate the borders of would-be romances. Marianne’s been set up with a twice-divorced geologist (he mentions marriage on their third date), and Tor’s found, via Grindr, an interesting puzzle in a psychologist who becomes a patient of the hospital where they work.
Haugerud has no trouble developing plot for the two, both mature enough to be undaunted by each new encounter. What’s of greater interest might be how this plot is contrasted — the film metronomically rebounds between spontaneous meet-ups and trysts, and the chance to reflect on it during work downtime. Around their main relationship interests, app-based hookups are depicted in a way both uninflected and perhaps over-defined. (Marianne, despite regularly working with gay patients, needs to have cruising explained to her.)
Despite their life-and-death work, the duo are also drawn in a way that emphasizes how prospective relationships are the one concern in their life that have any fluctuation. Neither Marianne nor Tor have any seriously compelling attachments to dramatic stakes from extended family, past relationships, career or housing precarity, or the neuroses that usually drive romantic narratives. Each of them are approaching mid-life, but they aren’t as old as their main attachments, and seem adapted to the world of apps and other contingencies better than their (few) friends and acquaintances. The two of them are shown in relief to characters who envy their independence; whereas in their steady conversations with each other, they couldn’t be more evenly matched.
What Haugerud aims to show is a kind of everyday ideal, where the kindness that the film’s protagonists extend to their more anxious dates is possibly due to the security of this professional partnership. Marianne provides feedback when Tor tests out the idea of continuing to meet the psychologist as a patient, even though now it would be mixing personal and professional spheres; Tor’s casual explanation of app-based hookups gives her the confidence to alternate between the developing romance she’s been pushed into and options that might better fulfill her needs.
It’s all very soothing, and it feels pitched very down-the-middle for an arthouse audience that wants to see a flattering mirror of reality: here is a romance movie that isn’t too much, isn’t chaotic, is quick to apologize but even quicker to know when a reassuring embrace is needed in place of words. Haugerud evidently sees a gap in the way filmmakers have approached the tech-rewritten games of meeting and parting, and has executed his vision with little jargon and almost no footage of people looking at screens.
What it suggests, in a way that cuts down its drama to something easily chewable, is that a romantic life of gently paced, thoughtful conversations exists, mediated by but not trapped by social tech. Haugerud’s characters come by this knowledge in a way that feels like a course of lessons. Their plain self-evidence and modesty is calibrated in such a way that Marianne and Tor, and by extension Haugerud, occupy rarified air free from dishonesty, doubt, and containing neither serious formal nor narrative complication.
This is perhaps then an exemplary case of what Hval refers to when she cites the “purified” love linguistically enclosed in the Norwegian “kjærlighet.” It’s a rare kind of object: a dialogue without an argument, an assured summer fantasy in place of the typical romantic structure of a quest. Where one senses a potential lie of narrative omission or the unambitious, maybe even unaccomplished aims of its film craft, Haugerud’s design proves evasive: it might be addressed in the other two parts of his trilogy, or it might, in the conceptual paradigm of Haugerud’s Oslo, require no answer at all.
DIRECTOR: Dag Johan Haugerud; CAST: Andrea Bræin Hovig, Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen, Thomas Gullestad, Lars Jacob; DISTRIBUTOR: Strand Releasing; IN THEATERS: May 16; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 59 min.
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