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‘Loveable’ Review: A Norwegian Marital Drama That Keeps Our Sympathies in Flux
Helga Guren gives a gutsy performance in Lilja Ingolfsdottir's occasionally overstated but emotionally jagged debut 'Loveable.'
Premiering in the main competition at Karlovy Vary, Ingolfsdottir’s first feature after a lengthy shorts career ought to score with any upscale arthouse viewers who admired recent Norwegian smash “The Worst Person in the World” (with which it shares producer Thomas Robsahm) but were past the point of relating to its heroine’s quarter-life crisis. What ensues is a fairly forensic psychological study, as they enter couple’s counseling with a patient, perceptive therapist (Heidi Gjermundsen Broch) — only for the increasingly drawn, checked-out Sigmund to withdraw from the sessions entirely, leaving a nervy Maria to confront long-ignored patterns in her personal history. It’s a performance vivid and specific enough to show up the film’s odd moments of unnecessary interior explanation: a too-pat scene where she repeats self-help mantras in the bathroom mirror, a replay in her head of an argument where she replaces her jabs with articulations of “unsafe” feeling, or, in a curious break of perspective, a shot of a subway busker singing a particularly maudlin version of Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” “Loveable” needs no such sentimental hand-holding; for its fierce, shattered heroine, learning to hold her own hand is the operative challenge.
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