06/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: The Norwegian filmmaker dives into the different ways one can experience intimacy

(© Fabrizio de Gennaro/Cineuropa)

What if one is not meant for emotional intimacy? Can the fleeting experience of sex be enough? For the protagonists of Dag Johan Haugerud’s Love [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Dag Johan Haugerud
film profile], finding the silver lining of their needs fulfilled sends them cruising on a series of Oslo ferries as well as into a deep ethical debate, about what we owe others and ourselves. We talked to the director about his film, the second part of a trilogy, which has premiered in Competition at the Venice Film Festival.

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Cineuropa: Your movie tackles love outside the monogamous, normative status quo. People tend to talk about this, but do we really accept it as viable yet? 
Dag Johan Haugerud: It depends on who you are and what kind of social environment you are part of. If you look at the character of Marianne, she's somewhere between 45 and 50. If she were 20 or 25, it would be different. Maybe she would feel that she's quite liberated already. 

So in the Western hemisphere, it is more of a generational movie?
Maybe. But I also hear about young people who are deciding not to have sex and are connecting sexuality to something much more violent. You hear about famous people who are saying "I'm not going to have sex before I meet someone that I can get romantically involved with". So maybe sex is on the retreat and romance is on the rise. 

Something ageless, however, is your characters being stuck in this cycle of wanting intimacy without commitment.
I think most people want both, to have some kind of liberated and free sexuality and also be very connected to just one lover. 

But when you have a character like Heidi, who is looking for open ways to read the world, and then becomes super conservative about relationships, one has to ask, do we lie to ourselves about what we want?
I think most people are like her. She wants to be open, she wants to behave in a certain way. But that's not always so easy. You can have ideas and ideals that you don't necessarily manage to live up to. Marianne wants to have a free life. At the same time, it can be quite hard to accept that you want to be connected to a person as well. 

When you're writing a film like this, is there a moment where you're thinking that you can almost draw too much from your own life?
I haven't thought about it that way. I try to channel other people's thoughts. Much of the inspiration has also come from books that I read. 

But you did write the screenplay with those specific actors in mind.
When I choose the actors, I want to challenge them to do something that is quite far from the things they have done earlier. That way they can give something to the character that an actor who is closer to them in personality couldn't.

The city of Oslo also plays a huge role. What kind of vibe do you want it to represent in your trilogy?
I don't come from Oslo myself, but from a town one and a half hour away. When I was a boy, we always went down to city hall. So for me, that is the heart of Oslo. It gives me a feeling of home. So I wanted to show that in quite a nostalgic way because Oslo has developed very much since then.