Love Is All You Need

You want romance? You’ll get romance. Not the prefabricated Hollywood kind with ridiculously attractive young people, carefully stripped of every last bit of life and sincerity, but the Susanne Bier kind. The Danish director (Brothers, In a Better World) has temporarily set aside difficult themes and the struggle for a better world to make a romantic comedy about an orange and a lemon. The lemon is played by Pierce Brosnan: a widower and fruit wholesaler. The orange is played by the wonderful Trine Dyrholm: a hairdresser who has not lost her sunny delight in life despite the uncertainty of being completely cured of cancer and her husband cheating on her with a (stereotypically) young woman while she was in for chemotherapy. Their improbable rapprochement occurs at the villa in Sorrento where their children are getting married.

Bier knows uncannily well how to shoot idyllic scenes and doesn’t hesitate to use music to reinforce emotion. The evergreen “That’s Amore” is squeezed completely dry. Love Is All You Need occasionally borders on bad taste and saccharine sentimentality, but it never crosses the line. The mushiness is counterbalanced by cruel twists of fate that add a bitter edge to this sweet lemonade.

Love Is All You Need ●●
DK, 2012, dir.: Susanne Bier, act.: Pierce Brosnan, Trine Dyrholm, 110 min.