A painkiller for both of us – Dag Johan Haugerud’s Love is a quietly sensational trilogy entry

Tommaso Tocci is a film critic based in Italy and France. He is most often seen on the European festival circuit, which he has covered for twenty years writing for Italian and international publications. He is also a programmer, translator and has worked for many festivals including Berlinale Talents, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Warsaw Film Festival and Giornate degli Autori.

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Venice 2024: Like going back to a place you cherish, a second trip to Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo makes for a reinvigorating, heart-tugging cinema experience, while also bringing his ongoing trilogy – Sex, Love, Dreams – into sharp focus for the first time.

Love (“Kjærlighet”) was possibly designed as the closing chapter out of the three, with Dreams (“Drømmer”) intended to slot in just ahead of it. But after a Berlinale premiere for Sex at the beginning of the year, it was Venice that snapped up the next serving of these delightful city-based meditations on intimacy and social boundaries. No matter, since by now we know them to be fairly interchangeable; the fittingly elusive Dreams will surely follow soon, and I personally can’t wait for its card to be the one lingering on the screen while the two others fade away, in the now familiar title sequence of this ambitious and highly original project.

Connected in themes but not in plot, Love introduces a new set of characters zipping about the Norwegian capital in the warm glow of a late August, while getting entangled in relationships and moral quandaries. Urologist Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig) is a single woman who’s perhaps not so keen on finding a steady partner after all, or in splurging for two bedside tables when one will do. This doesn’t stop her friend Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsen), working at the Department of Culture on a big ceremonial project for the city’s anniversary, from trying to set her up with a divorced geologist, Ole Harald (Thomas Gullestad).

When they all go visit him at his tranquil Nesodden house, Marianne shares a moment with him – talking about attraction and impulsively grabbing his butt on the way back from the roof terrace. She also sees his ex-wife living next door and the two kids he must devote his attention to: not a promising start for Marianne, herself a child of divorce who’s mindful of entering a fraught family space.

Meanwhile nurse Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen) – whom we first spot assisting in the background while Marianne delivers difficult news to her patients – is gay and even less bothered by not having a ‘regular’ relationship. Handsome and thoughtful, he often travels back and forth on the ferry to Nesodden, using the enclosed space to connect with strangers on Grindr, if only for a little chat. That’s what happens with Björn (Lars Jacob Holm), an older man that Tor will later meet again at the hospital, prompting him to navigate the tricky boundaries of professional and personal obligations.

Fans of Haugerud’s work will know that part of the fun lies in scrutinizing the many narrative threads on display early on, only a few of which will coalesce into a main storyline. Everything else is part of his masterful tapestry, a rich and novelistic approach to human stories that struck me as Foucaultian back at the time of Beware the Children («Barn», 2019), and which continues to project the illusion of an endless, hall-of-mirrors drama ensemble in each of his films.

Here it’s the ferry that cuts through that illusion, functioning as a key motif of dramatic transition which narrows down both scope and players, and gives the story its definitive shape. Meeting randomly on the boat, Marianne and Tor share a night chat about the nature of casual relationships, sex and commitment, which will lead the woman to some experimenting of her own during the next ferry ride. Returning director of photography Cecilie Semec’s camera shoots in and around Oslofjorden extensively, making sure the audience fully takes in these liminal moments, well beyond a simple means of getting from one place to another. Her rich, evocative compositions work in perfect balance with Peder Kjellsby’s score, an extensive presence throughout.

Once back in the city proper, Love puts in perspective some of the work Sex already did in incorporating the urban tissue of the capital into the story. While Haugerud’s cinema is deservedly hailed for its focus on language and intellectual exchange, it has perhaps gone under-explored how much these films are fascinated by architecture, macro-spaces and their social composition, and increasingly so as this trilogy progresses. An early, on-the-nose scene directly links some of the city’s monuments and history to sexual identity and how we represent it, the tricky part being that if we are all unique, then each of us is a niche, too – and how do we make a collective out of that?

In a nutshell, that seems to be one of Haugerud’s chief preoccupations: there is a moral element to his cinema that, if not didactic, can veer towards the political in the strictest sense of the word, dealing with the harmony of public life in the city and by extension in our society at large. One could argue that what the film is about – how to be more attuned to your own desires versus the broader categories imposed on us, and specifically the wavelengths of female and gay sexuality – is not a subject particularly plagued with conflict in rich, privileged and progressive Northern Europe.

And that each of the main characters’ journey of self-discovery in terms of sex or relationship structure is relatively tame, hardly straying from the norm in the world of today. But the director places his stories in post-conflict territory, where the challenge is imagining a different world, doing things better, and in full acknowledgment of the Other. In this universe, the biggest danger is that ‘you can’t take for granted that people get what you say’ as someone reminds Marianne, and the goal is seeking empathy rather than overcoming obstacles.

By that logic, there is many a scene in which Haugerud’s writing really stands out: a little aside in which Björn traces his life journey coming full-circle from the age of AIDS to battling cancer, or a moment of frank confrontation between Tor and Marianne that pays off several scenes of patient talks by alerting the woman of a nuance in communication that might have escaped her heterosexual point of view. Both revolve around bodies, and queer bodies in particular (I am reminded of how, in presenting Sex, Haugerud said he always writes from a queer perspective), offering dramatic beats that are as insightful as they are affecting.

For a film that seems determined to address love and sex in words only, this second chapter is even more rooted in physicality than its predecessor, repeatedly evoking a tactile sense of belonging. Various references to geology and urology speak to things that ‘come from below and tell our story’. And yet it’s Marianne who puts it best, when she calls the body a battlefield – a remark that dovetails nicely with fellow Venice competition entry Campo di battaglia («Battlefield»), in which veteran Italian director Gianni Amelio clearly goes for the same metaphor. Another story of doctors struggling to agree on what empathy means in relation to their patients, albeit in the much more extreme context of World War I and a pandemic.

Despite such undertones, which are definitely present and seem to draw a parallel between sexuality and illness as instances of the self negotiating with foreign forces, Love remains for the most part an utterly charming and optimistic experience. In the first few scenes especially, when Haugerud’s blocking and composition make it look like the film is teasing up some romantic intrigue of the ménage à trois variety, I thought of the obvious lineage going from Rohmer to Allen, and from there to contemporary examples of the French comédie romantique.

One master of the form, Emmanuel Mouret, also featured in the Venice Competition with his latest Three Friends («Trois Amies») a tale of middle-age men and women frantically going for a game of romantic musical chairs, exchanging and reconfiguring relationships among them in search of an equilibrium. Mouret is a good counterpoint for Haugerud, and in my opinion ideally his rival for the Best Screenplay prize, which instead went to Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here («Ainda Estou Aqui»). Both writers of refined and ornate dialogue, they seem to believe in a more intellectual pursuit of love, made all the more incisive by its reasonable and self-aware approach.

While still proudly displaying their cultural specificities – I’m personally intrigued by the neurotic, convoluted twists in the French film compared to the matter-of-fact, outward reasoning of the Norwegian one – there is a common ground in the mutual care and respect among their characters. Even the actors seem to zero in on this particular frequency, with both Hovig and Cittadella doing their best work in reacting to others and in pondering their thoughts.

The drama comes from the gap between the things we are aware of, and our best efforts to match them through action, as exemplified by Heidi who seems (perhaps excessively) scandalized by her good friend Marianne’s recent conduct: ‘you do things I would never do’ she says, perfectly detailing her biases and limitations even if respectfully unable to move past them. Hovig’s sweetly assured demeanor ensures Marianne takes it in her stride and continues on her path, which will bring her back to Nesodden once more, and to a place where you’re free to experiment and be yourself at the same time.

One could argue it’s utopical; I prefer to call it aspirational.