Love Is All You Need

Film (2012)

With Trine Dyrholm (Ida), Pierce Brosnan (Philip), Sebastian Jessen (Patrick), Molly Blixt Egelind (Astrid), Ciro Petrone (Alessandro), Paprika Steen (Benedikte), Kim Bodnia (Leif)

Astrid (Molly Blixt Egelind) and Patrick (Sebastian Jessen) are in Italy preparing a villa for their wedding. Her separated parents, Ida (Trine Dyrholm) and Leif (Kim Bodnia), do show up, but not in the most expected ways, and Patrick’s father, Philip (Pierce Brosnan), a workaholic executive, arrives with no expectations other than celebrating his son’s marriage, but soon develops some extra ones. Health and loss figure in, as do loneliness and dashed hopes, but the morphing and maturing of romances, and the revealing of the insides of others, makes for a full and diverse antipasto.

As the overworked widowed father of the young man slated to be married, Pierce Brosnan is dashingly middle-aged, and efficiently communicates his lack of time for romance, until, of course, he finds some.

Trine Dyrholm, as the bride’s mother, Ida, has a wide eyed appeal, her blue irises beckoning from an innocent and open face, making her look like a younger and less acute Helen Mirren. Her character’s challenges become stripped bare and Dyrholm wears the immediacies of her appearance with a vulnerable but bold demeanor.

Kim Bodnia (Leif) is a great buffoon, successfully canvassing all possible votes for disappointing ex-spouse.

Molly Blixt Egelind, angularly appealing as the bride to be, and Sebastian Jessen, charmingly out of his element as the groom, gyrate through the expectations and revelations with enough stretching of their muscles and identities to keep us winded.

The film is Danish, and much of the dialogue is Danish, though much is in English. Brosnan only speaks in English, and sometimes the Danish characters speak Danish to him while he speaks back in English. This is not an entirely convincing scenario, as though Philip had only mastered Danish import, but no export. Clearly, the production team was lucky to get a name actor like Brosnan in the role, but may not have had a very clear idea of how to adjust the script accordingly. This English-Scandinavian hybrid is only a bit more odd than the approach to broaden the audience taken by the Kon Tiki producers, who decided to shoot two separate versions, in Norwegian and in English.

There is some touching and raw stuff here mixed in with a hefty filling of marzipan and crackle, a little too sweet at times. If the narrative does not quite rise to the level of sucrose induction, the sweepingly awestruck score fills in the blanks with waves of the stuff. In the end, if one survives the sugary surf and the imperative generality of the English title – the Danish one, translated as The Bald Hairdresser, is much better – the story is not bad and the two pairs, Astrid and Patrick, and Ida and Philip, convey enough vulnerable disposition to the unexpected to keep one’s attention.

– BADMan