To this day I still wonder how Suzanne Bier’s In a Better World trumped Biutiful, Dogtooth, and Incendies for the 2010 Best Foreign Oscar. Bier’s follow up, Love is All You Need, seems to cater even more towards American sentiments, with a half-English, half-Danish romantic comedy that uses every neurotic and dysfunctional family plot twist derived from better material.
Cancer has ravaged Ida’s (Trine Dyrholm) body and her hair, but the worst is over; her treatment is complete and successful. The threat of cancer returning lingers, but she does not succumb to the treachery of the disease and remains an optimist. That is, until she arrives home to see her husband Leif (Kim Bodnia) making love to someone else on their couch. Then there is the Phillip (Pierce Brosnan), who is a downtrodden English workaholic fruit distributor, annoyed that his employees are celebrating his birthday and not at their desks working. These contrasting individuals are linked by the fact that their children will be married in Italy. But the parents have never met, which is odd since they both live in Denmark. By coincidence, and with an eye-rolling meet-cute, Ida accidentally backs her tiny vehicle into Phillip’s luxury car, and thus a strange and emotional weekend begins.
If the synopsis seems generic and formulaic, that is because it is. Love is All You Need is a fluffy, feel-good romantic comedy, with just the right amount of Scandinavian gloom for balance. It is a recipe that requires no measuring of ingredients; they are just tossed in willy-nilly. There is a wedding, family dysfunction, long-term mourning, with sexual misadventures practically dripping down the walls. There is the daring Leif who has invited the woman he had been seeing while Ida received her cancer treatments, and he even has the nerve to turn arguments that he has lost by default into his own personal peril, a la Lena Dunham’s Girls. Phillip’s sister-in-law and daughter exhibit their over-privileged disrespect and apathy towards any environment that is not air-conditioned, to every rational person’s annoyance.
If you are anything like me, you will admit that there is a sense of cinematic beauty in the film. Colors pop with flare, particularly the fruit, which is the most obvious metaphor for the film. First, the wedding’s location is at a lemon grove, a fruit that is appropriately both sour and sweet, like the film. Phillip is a fruit seller, and despite his gruff demeanor, he knows fruit inside and out, enough to understand lemons are technically a berry, and that ants are a sign of parasites; a metaphor for the more cumbersome guests at the wedding.
Director Suzanne Bier’s previous film In a Better World won the Best Foreign film Oscar several years ago, and was as tame and fluffy as they come, borderline artless, and made a shameful example of the Academy Awards’ Foreign category. Love is All You Need is even more timid, but despite its lighthearted fare, I am slightly more appreciative of the plot and its execution, even if it still reeks of generic romantic comedy pomp. The mix of English and Danish languages is no accident—or Brosnan’s casting for that matter—it is a deliberate attempt to reach the larger English audiences.
