Melissa Anderson
Lust for listening: Dag Johan Haugerud’s latest film demonstrates the amorous potency of attentive conversation.
Andrea Bræin Hovig as Marianne and Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen as Tor in Love. Courtesy CMPR. © Motlys K1.
Love, written and directed by Dag Johan Haugerud, now playing at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, New York City
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In amorous matters, the most important organ is the tongue; the most significant orifice, the ear. “Love makes me think too much,” Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse. “A fever of language overcomes me, a parade of reasons, interpretations, pronouncements.” Bountiful in talk—confessions, flirtations, observations, recriminations—Norwegian filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud’s captivating Love examines the erotics of conversation: talking as turn-on, listening as lubricant.
Part of an Oslo-set trilogy about intimacy and sexuality, Love takes place during three weeks in August, the Scandinavian summer light enhancing the movie’s voluptuousness. (The other titles in the triptych will also open at Film Forum: Sex in June, Dreams in the fall.) Love follows the parallel romantic lives of two hospital employees: Marianne (Andrea Bræin Hovig), a fortysomething urologist, and Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen, immensely appealing), a late-millennial nurse. She is straight; he is gay. If not exactly friends, these colleagues share an unshakeable admiration born of the collaborative nature of their work, established in Love’s opening scene, which also underscores the central theme of paying attention.
Off-screen, Marianne delivers a prostate-cancer diagnosis to a youngish guy, filmed in head-and-shoulders close-up, his pallid complexion and dishwater-blond hair sharply offset by the hot-pink T-shirt of the food-delivery service he works for. Several feet behind him sits Tor, serving as on-call emotional support (he’ll hug another patient who takes his grim health news less stoically) and, just as crucially, psychic auscultation, a second set of ears. He gently points out to Marianne that the man in the brightly hued tee likely didn’t understand his prognosis. Later, he’ll mention that, for gay men in particular, she needs to explain how prostate surgery will diminish the pleasures of anal sex—feedback the physician humbly receives.
Their solid professional rapport—each talking and listening to the other with utmost respect—extends to their after-hours exchanges. On ferry rides between the capital city and Nesodden—an outlying peninsular town, where Tor is living for the summer and where Marianne has both a close friend and, soon, a lover—the coworkers open up about their private lives. During one of these twenty-three-minute sea voyages taking place well into the evening, Tor, now sporting a cruising outfit of leather jacket and cutoff jean shorts, explains to Marianne his fondness for using Grindr on the commuter ship, the app revealing persons of interest sometimes seated mere feet away.
Lars Jacob Holm as Bjørn and Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen as Tor in Love. Courtesy CMPR. © Motlys K1.
It is through this geolocating that Tor meets Bjørn (Lars Jacob Holm), a reticent middle-aged psychologist who claims he’s on the dating and sex app for neither—he simply wants “to browse.” Their initial encounter touchingly reveals the divide—in generational outlook, temperament, carnal appetite—between them, a gap that Tor eagerly tries to bridge but that Bjørn, arms folded across his chest, appears too terrified to ever consider closing. “What’s it like, having sex nowadays?” the older man, seeming to have resigned himself to celibacy for the rest of his life, asks the younger one—a query that Tor answers expansively, tenderly.
Love might be thought of as a series of two-handers; most of the film consists of discrete, occasionally overlapping, segments revealing a dyad immersed in discussion. What makes these disquisitional pas de deux so fascinating is Haugerud’s—and the actors’—acute understanding of conversational choreography: the pauses, verbal mirroring, and disclosures necessary to keep the words and feelings flowing.
And those words are, for the most part, free of banalities, another impressive achievement for such a dialogue-heavy project invested in a topic as cliché-sodden as human connection. (The film’s weakest thread concerns an upcoming municipal celebration, the preparations for this Oslo-fest giving way to dopey ideas about civic benevolence.) The intelligence of Haugerud’s script is especially evident in the tête-à-têtes Marianne has with two sex partners: Ole (Thomas Gullestad), a twice-divorced, marriage-mad geologist and doting father of two young girls, with whom she hesitantly begins a relationship, and (inspired by Tor’s ferry frolics) a Tinder hookup known only as the Carpenter (Morten Svartveit). With the former, the physician holds forth on her opposition to marital vows and hetero-reproduction. With the latter, she engages in a postcoital colloquy about ethical nonmonogamy (the Carpenter’s wife of twenty years doesn’t know he’s on the apps), her courteous questions quickly revealing his peevishness.
Andrea Bræin Hovig as Marianne and Thomas Gullestad as Ole Harald in Love. Courtesy CMPR. © Motlys K1.
Although those exchanges have their moments of tension and discord, they are still of a piece with Love’s core undertaking: to effectively dramatize what it’s like to really listen and to be listened to, a skill and an intoxicating delight constantly imperiled by shattered attention spans. While phones make it possible for Marianne to meet the Carpenter and Tor to meet Bjørn—who will cross paths again, a meeting that will lead to a profound closeness—I don’t recall those devices, or any other gadgets, making additional appearances.
And yet the scarcity of these tech tools doesn’t make Haugerud’s film seem hopelessly naïve; Love in no way advances a Luddite agenda or makes the case for digital detox. (The topics never even come up.) Instead, it matter-of-factly, casually reminds us of the joys of being fully absorbed in another’s words. It evokes a handful of exceptional movies—Bergman’s Persona (1966), Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995), Andrew Haigh’s Weekend (2011), the latter released just as smartphone ownership began its inexorable rise—that demonstrate the singular thrill of knowing your most intimate disclosures are indelibly altering the person you are sharing them with. The only cure for phone addiction is the fever of language.
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press. A collection of her film criticism, The Hunger, will be published this year by Film Desk Books.