I’ll get over it quickly so I don’t have to later: The Worst Man in the World. Joachim Trier’s excellent film should probably always be mentioned, involuntarily and somewhat lazily, whenever another Norwegian drama is produced, in which the heroine tries to shake up her life while everything around her seems to be collapsing like a house of cards. However, now that I’ve learned that part, I can get to the point that Loveable, by its English title, offers something quite different: a long, therapeutic process about a disintegrating relationship, which the participants probably don’t want to be either. Save.
Loveable’s main character, Maria (Helga Gören), gets a brief but dynamic glimpse into her life in a montage at the beginning of the film. He’s just finished a terrible seven-year relationship, with whom he had two children, and is trying his hand at art and creativity, with little success. Until he meets Sigmund (Oddgeir Thune) at a party, whose name could actually be a good omen for where this film is going. Maria and Sigmund get together, the woman gets pregnant, and there’s great happiness. Then we jump to seven years later: the couple have two children, Maria is completely stressed about everyday tasks, while Sigmund disappears for weeks on end for work. Some ugly arguments escalate to the point where they realize that things can’t go on like this: forty-year-old Maria is incapable of existing like this, while Sigmund is disgusted by her behavior. They walk away.
Loveable could go in many directions here that we've seen a thousand times: Maria could find a new partner, go exploring Southeast Asia, become a trans, whatever. Lilja Ingólfsdóttir's film, on the other hand, chooses a path that even Western European films rarely choose: Maria starts going to therapy, where she is mercilessly confronted with her behavior, her sentences, what she says, and how she acts in the relationship in general. That everyone involved wanted to escape.
“If you don’t face your traumas, your relationship will,” Ingólfsdóttir said of her film’s plot. One could easily blame the beloved for the fact that the welfare society of Western Europe, and the upper middle class within it, mixes a fairly comfortable life with rampant social life. Treatment speech In its appearance, that is, many people outside the psychological environment have begun to use professional terms. On the other hand, Mahboub avoids this trap, and even if he summarizes a relatively long treatment, he does not present it as a miracle-working process, but as something that requires work, introspection, and a lot of energy.
The film doesn't consist of many scenes, but the strongest one is undoubtedly when Maria is forced to think about how she gestures, thinks and acts in the scene that sets off the conflict at the beginning of Loveable. The sentence in the title of the article also causes him such self-examination: when Sigmund says it, it suddenly appears in all the previous beautiful shared memories like a dark, indelible stain. Ingolfsdottir's text confronts the protagonist with his stupidity and doesn't let him get away with relatively easy solutions.
Loveable practically stands or falls on its main character, who is in virtually every scene. Helga Gören is a relatively unknown face as a film actress, having already played a lot in Norwegian theater, but then she would presumably not be unknown to the world if she won the prestigious awards for her role. She has something of the steely gaze of the German Sandra Hüller, but more subtle and emotional.
He is not afraid to appear as a character so odious that anyone who sees five minutes of his behavior in the film would send him to therapy. In contrast, Oddgeir Thune, who plays Sigmund, is a pleasant but unrecognizable phenomenon – when Maria turns on him at the beginning of the film, we can even feel that he is right. Only later does it become clear that the biggest problem in the relationship is not the children, not the separation of several weeks, but Maria herself. The question is whether we can love him at all. Or can he love her.
Beloved is not an Ingmar Bergman film, it is not a Cassavetes film, it is not a long exploration of the hidden glimmers that can occur in the twilight of a relationship, nor is it an aggressive denial of it. Rather, it is a beautiful demonstration of what Christa D. Toth also talked about in her Telex interview not long ago—that it is very important to deal with people’s mental health, and that we should not hurt others because of our injuries. Even in advanced Norway, this is not entirely self-evident, but Ingólfsdóttir’s film is a good example of how possible and worthwhile it is.
The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and Helen Guerin won Best Actress.
Elskling (or English: Loveable) premiered in the competition program of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. There is no information about a Hungarian screening yet.
