WHAT ABOUT LOVE WHEN YOU HAVE THREE MONTHS TO LIVE?
Anja (Andrea Braein Hovig) learns that she’s dying of cancer; as Christmas approaches, she and her husband (Stellan Skarsgård) grapple with the news and prepare to tell the kids. The director’s sophomore film is a lauded drama made believable and moving with great help from the cast, especially Braein Hovig. The warmth of the family portrait is conveyed with conviction and strengthened by the complexity of the script; in the middle of the crisis, there’s a lot of resentment between the married couple, which is something we learn more about as the story progresses. Maybe it won’t be anyone’s favorite Yuletide flick, but a punch in the gut nonetheless.
2019-Norway-Sweden-Denmark. 130 min. Color. Widescreen. Produced by Thomas Robsahm. Written and directed by Maria Sødahl. Cast: Andrea Braein Hovig (Anja), Stellan Skarsgård (Tomas), Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne (Julie), Alfred Vatne, Steinar Klouman Hallert, Daniel Storm Forthun Sandbye.
Trivia: Original title: HĂĄp.Â
Last word: “This is my own story. And that’s the recipe. And to wait six years after the incident before you start telling it so that you have distance and you can see the absurdities. You’ve finished with the crying, you’ve finished with the grief, which makes you not able to do anything. So, that’s where it started at, and I was reluctant to work with the material. Not because I didn’t want to go there, myself, but I didn’t want other people to have to be there.” (Sødahl, Hammer to Nail)
