Upcoming Release Review: Love Is All You Need (Susanne Bier, 2012)

Danish director Susanne Bier (In A Better World, winner of Best Foreign Language Film at the 2010 Academy Awards, and After the Wedding) teams up again with her regular screenwriting collaborator, Anders Thomas Jensen, for Love Is All You Need, a sunny and syrupy Italian-set romantic drama.

Ida (Trine Dyrholm, In A Better World), a hairdresser living in Copenhagen, has just completed a treatment of chemotherapy for diagnosed breast cancer. In the days prior to her flight to Sorrento for the wedding of her daughter Astrid (Molly Blixt Egelind) to Patrick (Sebastian Jessen), Ida learns that her tactless husband Lief (Kim Bodnia) is having an affair with a young accountant from his office – and soon intends to leave Ida and remarry – which results in further humiliation.

While at the airport she embarrassingly backs into a terse, uptight and self-centered businessman (Pierce Brosnan, The Ghost Writer), who is understandably less than impressed. Coincidentally, this is Patrick’s widowed father Phillip, also on his way to Italy. What follows is a kitchen-sink drama that tracks awkward revelations about both dysfunctional families, suffering from an array of personal conflicts and repressed emotions. But, amidst it all, both Ida and Phillip find an unexpected second chance at love.

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