Critic Reviews

Love, to quote that woozy old ballad, is indeed a many-splendored thing that takes many forms — a multiplicity that Love the film is quietly alive to.

Love’s commentary on modern relations may be more complex and chewy than just “live and let live,” but the film’s calm embrace of whatever works for the individual is refreshingly humane, rhetorically exciting and more than a little hot.

With Love, Mr. Haugerud has fashioned a film with a rich complexity of feelings, navigated by people taking full advantage of their own freedoms. It’s the sort of talky European drama that, in its well-expressed thoughtfulness, leaves one feeling strangely refreshed. I’ll happily take two more.

With contemplative slow pacing that is leisurely rather than laborious, and Cecilie Semec’s clean, luminous camerawork equally making the most of Oslo’s harbour area and the cast’s characterful, attentive faces, Love is a drama about choice, chance and the carpe diem imperative, especially in the face of illness and emotional distress.

The director Dag Johan Haugerud’s gently humanistic drama is one of those films that feels akin to a prism, refracting its theme into the array of colors it contains.

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.

Love remains distinct, given its unsparing view of people as flawed and not very sure of themselves.