Loveable movie storyline. While Sigmund is always away on business, Maria juggles her career with childcare and managing the home. Like many other relationships, theirs was also all about love and harmony in the early stages, however, after years of married life, the cracks started to appear. Sigmund is ultimately the one to ask for a divorce, and Maria is forced to confront her greatest fears.
Lovable (Norwegian: Elskling) is a Norwegian drama film directed by Lilja Ingolfsdottir and starring Helga Guren, Oddgeir Thune, Heidi Gjermundsen Broch, Marte Solem, Kyrre Haugen Sydness, Maja Tothammer-Hruza, Victor Roll Nordstoga, Elisabeth Sand, Anna Lou Mamen and Mona Grenne. The screenplay was written by Lilja Ingolfsdottir.
Film Review for Loveable
The opening of Loveable may remind some viewers of the beginning of Noah Baumbach’s Oscar-winning divorce drama, Marriage Story. In Baumbach’s film, the two leads are asked to list all the things they love about each other, immediately offering the happy history of this marriage that has gone awry.
In Loveable, Maria’s (Guren) voiceover narrates how she met and fell in love with her second husband, Sigmund (Oddgeir Thune). Maria has two children with her ex-husband, a marriage that ended acrimoniously. As she tries to rediscover herself and her career post-divorce, she meets the handsome and charismatic Sigmund at a party and is immediately entranced by him.
It takes a while for them to meet again, but once they do, they quickly fall madly in love. The movie then jumps seven years and the rose-tinted fervor of the honeymoon phase has been replaced by the grey realities of married life. Maria and Sigmund have two children of their own now, and they live together with Maria’s two older children, including the now teenage Alma (Maja Tothammer-Hruza) who is incredibly volatile towards her mother, relentlessly bashing her with insults at every second and demanding permission to move to her father’s house.
Maria has given up her career to raise the children, which she mostly does on her own as Sigmund, a musician, spends weeks at a time on the road. After his return from six weeks away from the family, a mundane argument gives way to an explosive row that ends with Sigmund considering divorce. The rest of the film follows Maria during this fallout, as Sigmund’s insistence that she needs help in handling her anger leads her to look inward and really examine the person she has become.
Between being away from her children, her husband who she loves wanting to leave her, and her reckoning with the relationship behaviors that have been passed down to her from her own mother, Maria learns that to fix her family she must first fix herself. It’s essentially the European, arthouse cinematic treatment of RuPaul’s catchphrase “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you going to love somebody else?” It’s a cliché but as Loveable so deftly shows, it’s undeniably true.
About a quarter of the way through Loveable, you realize that the similarities to Marriage Story end when the movie shifts focus from the breakdown of a marriage to Maria’s self-discovery. Sigmund ignores her calls and texts, and she paces the lonely flat a friend has lent her. She tries to visit Alma at school but she is aggressively rebuffed and told she is an embarrassment.
When she meets Sigmund at his work and starts hitting herself and exclaiming that she’s no good, she takes on his advice to see a therapist, but only if they go together. The film is quick to dispel any ideas that Maria is a victim and nothing more in the story. She does get angry, she doesn’t handle her daughter’s temper well, and she can’t accept the love and care Sigmund tries to offer her and responds with hostility.
Loveable (2024)
Elskling
Directed by: Lilja Ingolfsdottir
Starring: Helga Guren, Oddgeir Thune, Heidi Gjermundsen Broch, Marte Solem, Kyrre Haugen Sydness, Maja Tothammer-Hruza, Victor Roll Nordstoga, Elisabeth Sand, Anna Lou Mamen, Mona Grenne
Screenplay by: Lilja Ingolfsdottir
Production Design by:
Cinematography by: Øystein Mamen
Film Editing by: Lilja Ingolfsdottir, Anton Robsahm
Makeup Department : Jamila Zia
Art Direction by: Lilja Ingolfsdottir
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Trust Nordisk
Release Date: October 11, 2024 (Norway)
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