En kärlekshistoria (A Love Story) is very much better than anything I have read about it would lead me to expect, and the reason it is so much better is something many who otherwise love the movie criticize it for: that it is NOT just a love story. It is NOT just about the two ethereally innocent and lovely pubescent lovers but about the ugly adults who surround them.
If this movie HAD been only about Pär and Annika, it would indeed have been an extraordinary and breathtakingly beautiful love story, and it would have fulfilled the promise of its title and the hopes of very many viewers. But it is a Roy Andersson movie, and even as a fresh-out-of-school twenty-something making his very first feature-length movie, his genius for cutting through illusion to the hardness under the surface of life was fully in evidence.
Those who see En kärlekshistoria as being radically different from his recent movies - Songs from the Second Floor and You, The Living - and even from Giliap, made only a few years after En kärlekshistoria, are wearing blinders, choosing to see only the loveliness on its surface and denying the hard reality under and all around the loveliness.
ALL of Andersson's movies are like this one. ALL of them are beautiful on one level and devastatingly harsh on another. That is what makes him such an extraordinary movie-maker and his movies so extraordinarily rewarding to watch. Without the hardness under the surface, the beauty on the surface would be empty and of only minimal, temporary value. It might entertain and delight us, but it would not teach us anything about our own world or change us in any way. We would have been made to feel good for a few minutes, but we would not have gotten anything of lasting value from the experience.
So the ugly adults HAVE to be in this Love Story, because without them this is nothing but a daydream, a fleeting glimpse into the world of young love, a world that is open to us for only a few months as we are making the astounding transition from childhood, like butterflies emerging unsteadily from our cocoons. That innocent, pure and lovely love is not available to adults, or even to adolescents. Once the cocoon has been sloughed and the wings dried and warmed, the butterfly flies off into its "real" life, and our fragile, emerging innocence is gone forever.
The adults in En kärlekshistoria give its love story the context it needs, call our attention to and accentuate its purity and loveliness, and show us how transient that loveliness is. The point (only one of many) Andersson is making (and we do not want to see) is that Pär and Annika are going to turn out to be just like their parents and other relatives: hard, selfish, stupid, abusive, and ugly. They cannot turn out any other way, because - like it or not - that is how we adults are.
By showing us what Pär and Annika will be like in just a very few months (the bully who beat up Pär is only slightly older but already like the adults), Andersson gives us an invaluable frame for the lovely snapshot he took of them at their loveliest. That moment, that loveliness, is just as real as and certainly more pleasant to look at than the other, adult reality, but the two sharply contrasting realities need each other to make life tolerable. That contrast is what makes En kärlekshistoria a work of genius and power, much more than just a sweet but vapid story of young love.
If this movie HAD been only about Pär and Annika, it would indeed have been an extraordinary and breathtakingly beautiful love story, and it would have fulfilled the promise of its title and the hopes of very many viewers. But it is a Roy Andersson movie, and even as a fresh-out-of-school twenty-something making his very first feature-length movie, his genius for cutting through illusion to the hardness under the surface of life was fully in evidence.
Those who see En kärlekshistoria as being radically different from his recent movies - Songs from the Second Floor and You, The Living - and even from Giliap, made only a few years after En kärlekshistoria, are wearing blinders, choosing to see only the loveliness on its surface and denying the hard reality under and all around the loveliness.
ALL of Andersson's movies are like this one. ALL of them are beautiful on one level and devastatingly harsh on another. That is what makes him such an extraordinary movie-maker and his movies so extraordinarily rewarding to watch. Without the hardness under the surface, the beauty on the surface would be empty and of only minimal, temporary value. It might entertain and delight us, but it would not teach us anything about our own world or change us in any way. We would have been made to feel good for a few minutes, but we would not have gotten anything of lasting value from the experience.
So the ugly adults HAVE to be in this Love Story, because without them this is nothing but a daydream, a fleeting glimpse into the world of young love, a world that is open to us for only a few months as we are making the astounding transition from childhood, like butterflies emerging unsteadily from our cocoons. That innocent, pure and lovely love is not available to adults, or even to adolescents. Once the cocoon has been sloughed and the wings dried and warmed, the butterfly flies off into its "real" life, and our fragile, emerging innocence is gone forever.
The adults in En kärlekshistoria give its love story the context it needs, call our attention to and accentuate its purity and loveliness, and show us how transient that loveliness is. The point (only one of many) Andersson is making (and we do not want to see) is that Pär and Annika are going to turn out to be just like their parents and other relatives: hard, selfish, stupid, abusive, and ugly. They cannot turn out any other way, because - like it or not - that is how we adults are.
By showing us what Pär and Annika will be like in just a very few months (the bully who beat up Pär is only slightly older but already like the adults), Andersson gives us an invaluable frame for the lovely snapshot he took of them at their loveliest. That moment, that loveliness, is just as real as and certainly more pleasant to look at than the other, adult reality, but the two sharply contrasting realities need each other to make life tolerable. That contrast is what makes En kärlekshistoria a work of genius and power, much more than just a sweet but vapid story of young love.