LOVEABLE

Φεβ 04, 2025 Κινηματογράφος 0

MOVIE REVIEWS

THE PASSIONS OF WOMEN

Loveable: by Kallitsa Vlachou

1895 is the year of the Lumier brothers’ invention of the projection machine and the first public screening of their films. At the same time, Breuer and Freud’s “Studies on Hysteria” were published. Psychoanalysis and cinema have since then followed paths that sometimes meet, because the language of cinema has a very high degree of affinity with the language of psychoanalysis, since cinema and psychoanalysis highlight, through art and science respectively, the complex aspects of human personality.

Loveable: a pleasant surprise

In the world of cinema, Ingmar Bergman is considered by many to be the “master of psychoanalysis”, since his films (“Personna”, “Autumn Sonata”, “Scenes from a Wedding”) were of great psychoanalytical interest. From the Scandinavian countries comes Norwegian Lilia Ingolfsdottir’s film, which is also her film debut. Quite influenced by and drawing on Bergman’s cinema, her film is a very pleasant surprise.

Maria shows a dynamic woman who lives with her two young children after recently being divorced. She is shown to have her feet firmly on the ground, being highly combative and tenacious, characteristics that are further highlighted when she meets Sigmund at a party and falls in love with him at first sight and makes it her goal to win him over, which she accomplishes.

Lovable: Different

Seven years later, we meet her with two more children, having raised her family, with the man she fell in love with and loved, Sigmund, by her side. But we meet her differently. More neurotic, more stressed, more tired as if she is slowly losing control of the situation, trying to manage all the problems of a large family, including two teenagers and two young children, trying to meet everyone’s needs, alone most of the time, since Sigmund is away a lot because of his work commitments.

The outbursts of anger often bring nagging and gradually distancing her from her partner and also from her teenage daughter who reacts more and more strongly, expressing her displeasure at the way her mother behaves towards her. Control is lost and with it Sigmund’s patience, who, feeling suffocated in the family environment, asks Maria for a separation. And then Maria’s world falls apart…

Loveable: The world is crumbling

“If you leave me, I’ll die” her first reaction, her first statement. Maria’s world is crumbling. Maria refuses to accept such a decision, shudders at the idea of abandonment and begs her husband, trying to save her relationship.

Life, love, psychic death begin to emerge in a tangled tangle behind the words, the looks, behind the thoughts and feelings that overwhelm Maria during the difficult lonely nights in the deserted apartment she takes refuge in after her husband’s decision.

Loveable: The Quest for Order

Starting from scratch, Maria, with the help of her therapist, will try to discover the thread of the tangled bundle of her life and put that life in order. Gradually we watch her interact with herself and begin to deconstruct the facade she has been systematically cultivating and imprisoning herself in for years, increasingly alienated from her true self.

An estrangement that begins in her childhood, to which she “returns” in search of a creative encounter with her mother, an encounter that, it seems, did not take place at the time that would have greatly assisted her as a child in a smooth transition to adulthood.

Loveable: a self-help manual?

With very delicate manipulations, Lilia Ingolfsdottir maintains the very delicate balance between cinema and psychoanalysis, avoiding making her film an easy “self-help manual” – except for the scene in the mirror, where she tells us in words what she had previously supported well, so the words there are superfluous and land us somewhat abruptly with their millennial simplicity; the director avoids the ease of blaming parents or our surroundings or even our heroine herself.

Under the microscope of the cinematic narrative and analysis of her heroine’s personality comes the way in which her interaction with her surroundings, and the idiosyncratic elements of her character itself, lead her to roles such as that of an emancipated woman, who tries to keep everything under control, unconsciously carrying intergenerational traumas on her shoulders, always taking care to hide her constant fear of non-acceptance and rejection by others, as well as the fear of revealing her weaknesses. The fear of ceasing to be loved. Lest she cease to be their ‘darling’.

Loveable: inner journey

The way Lilia Ingolfsdottir films all this – with her very close-ups of Maria (Helga Guren’s performance is excellent), the repetition of the same sequence under different perspectives that emerge each time in the development of Maria’s inner journey, the personal narrative motivated by the psychotherapist’s questions – brings us very close to the heroine. To her emotional acrobatics that sometimes make her sympathetic, sometimes not, to her mistakes and passions that surely remind us of something very much our own, so that when we leave the theatre we feel the therapeutic effect that the right confluence of cinema and psychoanalysis has on us.

LOVEABLE

Directed by Lilja Ingolfsdottir

Written by Lilja Ingolfsdottir

Photography by Øystein Mamen

Sound by Bror Kristiansen, Daniel Lindvik, Vegard Ronæss Soldal

Produced by Thomas Robsahm

Actors: Oddgeir Thune (Sigmund), Kyrre Haugen Sydness (Maria’s ex), Helga Guren (Maria), Maja Tothammer-Hruza (Maria’s teenage daughter), Heidi Gjermundsen (therapist), Esrom Kidane (Larer), Solveig Nesle Stang Haugland (Stella)

Country of production: Norway

Language: norwegian

Year of production: 2024

Genre: romantic tragedy

Duration: 101΄

Distribution company: One From The Heart

Release date: 19/12.2024

For more information on the coefficients and technical characteristics, see here..

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