Love is All You Need (15)
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Dir: Susanne Bier
With: Pierce Brosnan, Trine Dyrholm
Runtime: 116 minutes
AT the end of a winter (one lives in hope) that would have had a polar bear reaching for its mittens, a fine way to beckon the summer this weekend is to take a dip in Susanne Bier's sun-dappled romantic drama.
Bier is the Danish director of After the Wedding (with Mads Mikkelsen), the Oscar-winning In a Better World, and Brothers. She is also helming Serena, the forthcoming Depression-era drama with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper.
The Bier MO is to make rich, savvy, engaging films about grown-ups, for grown-ups. Love is All You Need is no exception, even if it is a romcom, the genre that so often gives rise to predictable pap. Bier might be on the up in Hollywood, but her tale of a woman learning to live again is thoroughly European in its gentle nature and emotional complexity.
The woman in question is Ida (Trine Dyrholm), a Danish hairdresser recovering from breast cancer. Among her reasons to live is to see her daughter married. Everything else – illness, her iffy marriage – can wait till she has returned from Sorrento, where the nuptials are to take place.
Also heading to Italy is Philip (Pierce Brosnan), the father of the groom and a man with his own sadnesses to bear. What everyone needs is a happy family occasion lightened by sun, sea, sand and bonhomie, but will the fates play along?
Brosnan and Dyrholm make a terrific pairing as a duo of wounded birds wondering if they could, or should, fly again.
Bier, working from a screenplay from Anders Thomas Jensen (also In a Better World), keeps the drama nicely grounded, adding a few prods here and there when sentimentality threatens to take over. A tonic.
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