Alicia I love this movie so much

Matcollis This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Inclubabu Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Maurizio73 Two teenagers, Par and Annika, meet by chance during a visit to their relatives guests to a nursing home. Born among them a tender feeling growing in the background of a thin family distress and social impact, including regrets and recriminations of older people and betrayed the expectations of the most 'young people, along the dividing line of a generational crisis that is a mirror and reflection of a country that seems to have lost their national identity. In cold and distant reverberations of a remote Swedish Summer, director Roy Andersson seems to chase the chimera of a 'New Cinema' which (belatedly) aims to public attention through a Scandinavian vigilant attention to the events of the younger generation (teenagers who imitate American riders between leather jackets and juke box), not failing, however, to return the existential sense of a profound inability to communicate like a worm that eats away hopelessly family relationships and decreasing the aesthetics of the new impulses that had troubled European cinema in the previous years in the context mature and aware of non-trivial analysis of social relations and of an irreversible crisis of values, as happened in those years with the extraordinary exploits of Michelangelo Antonioni. Andersson attempts to capture the chorus of this social dimension through the use of medium shots that collect the plurality of appearances that fill the screen as an overview on the evolution of human relationships, often dropping the camera eye on the detail of the first plans from which we grasp the sense of a shared personal pain that makes collective grief (the grandfather crying at the beginning of the film claiming the imprisonment aware of the existence of a terminal condition, the young Eva who confesses his granddaughter premature failure of a personally and professionally project , the hysterical laughter of John shows that the sense of a contemptuous unbearable frustration individual). Against the background of this social and cultural discomfort you shake the manifesto of this new cinema, overlap the 'wave' of this generational aesthetic where you insert the delicate dialectic of a theory of looks that weave the plot of a visual approach, the bitter lust a sweet discovery sentimental, the return in motorbike without headlights in a twilight full of hopes. Striking the ending where in the delirium of ethyl salesman refrigerators will raise the desperate cry of a social failure as a prelude to the final tragicomic in the morning fog, a new sad homecoming. Cinema of passage, between the cold nihilism of a generational disenchantment and the silence of a domestic in communicability family, which returns the thickness of a work that collects 5 nominations and 4 awards at the Berlin Film Festival in 1970. The icy glare of Swedish Nouvelle Vogue.

tieman64 Directed by Roy Andersson, "A Swedish Love Story" stars Rolf Sohlman as Par, a fifteen year old kid who's madly in love with local girl Annika (Ann Kylin). Around our young lovers swirls a world of adults. Alienated, disillusioned, broke, tired, and devoid of hope, these adults seem on the brink of meltdown. Par and Annika, of course, are the opposite. Madly in love, they see the world through idealised eyes; everything's gold. Watch them dance.Novice actors, Rolf and Kylin lend the film a rare fragility. They're awkward, confused, their characters' romance conveyed with amorous glances and simple exchanges. Andersson's direction is low key. Very low key. The film moves like a whisper, a teenage dream, moments of whimsy and bounce periodically giving way to adults who grumble and grouse. Damn them. Damn those pesky adults, with their "problems" and their "baggage". Why they so blue? "Humanity is composed of a bunch of bastards," one grotesque adult grumbles. "Money is all that matters," another moans.But Par and Annika don't notice. How can they? They're like dandelion dust, fluttering, playing in an adolescent fun-yard, touching bodies, experiencing one another, probing and prodding and basking in all that is adolescent and awkward and oh so soft and gentle and my oh my there's my first kiss. To Andersson, Par and Annika are creatures still in a state of innocence. They're Adam and Eve before the fall. Lif and Lifthrasir in their secret forest, though around them the mundanity of maturity heaves its massive bulk. It's coming. But will our young couple turn into monsters? Will they be like daddy and mommy and their dour aunts and uncles? Of course not. They have hope, and zest and look good in miniskirts, tight jeans and when posed on-top motorcycles. They're rebels, baby. They've got things figured out. The world's their oyster. Blue jeans and push up bras. They're the future and the future is bright.Yeah, right.Interestingly, while Andersson's going for a balancing act – the shipwreck of adulthood juxtaposed with the blissful naivety of youth – for the purposes of advocating youthful optimism, the effect is the opposite. You want to slap these kids. You want to tell Annika to stop dressing like a hooker and Par to stop trying to look like James Dean. You ain't cool, kid.Incidentally, though perhaps not surprisingly, once you see how it aestheticises youthfulness, copies of the film frequently turn up after FBI paedophile raids. And whilst Andersson's films frequently counterpoint jaded maturity with blissful ignorance, "A Swedish Love Story's" young/old binary is a bit too simplistic. Often it's pessimists who are the most "optimistic" and the blissful who, in their self absorption, are truly "pessimistic". And of course adults are as delusional as kids, if not more so, and indeed are directly responsible for the delusions of the latter.7.9/10 - Worth one viewing.

beckettesque Quite a few years ago, when I fell in love with Roy Andersson, it was mainly in relation to his late aestheticism, his realist-absurdist films Sånger från andra våningen and Du levande, but also his brilliant short films. Now that I finally got round to this early film of his, I can only confirm that I am no longer in love, rather that I definitely love this director.Kärlekshistoria is a cinematic experience very much different than his later work and, at the same time, to a considerable extend related to it. This apparent ambiguity lies in the different realist/absurdist relations. While Sånger/Du levande present very real aspects of life in all their absurdity, in Kärlekshistoria it is content, rather than form that is dominantly absurd(ist). In this particular film, you will not meet a colourful cast of no-name people painfully engaged; entrapped into their miserable lives that do not seem to go anywhere. No old people dragging their dogs in the street, or weird-looking strangers in bars. However, this is not to say that that brand of cinematic opulence is absent from En kärlekshistoria. Quite the contrary, the characters do indeed feel the same things, do the same things, fail at the exact same things. In fact, I would go so far as to imply that both his earlier and his recent films revolve around the same: the dramatic irony that represents the essence of (failed) human condition.The (prominent) love storyline is set in the only context possible: childhood. This storyline is dominant, in terms of screen time as well as in terms of soundtrack; you basically watch two teenage souls fall in love, or something akin to it, if at times too much aided by music. At first the setting did not seem very Anderssonesque, though, almost alien to the image I'd remembered and cherished the director. What is more, I will concede to being slightly annoyed at the whole construction of the film. Naturally, after some time I acknowledged how misled I was.Actually, it was not until the last half an hour of the film that it, at long last, started to dawn upon me, when En kärlekshistoria's subtle and darker implications started unfurling. I felt like a stranger to the world of adults, as opposed/juxtaposed to the world of the young love- birds that I got to know and relate to. Mayhap I was too distracted at that point to fathom it, or to even recognise its presence/omnipotence, but, at any rate, I am quite sure this narrative device is deliberate. The music, I believe, served to push the boy-meets-girl story to the fore, leaving the adults to mind their own business and, consequently, the viewer not to.Bottom line should be the tagline. Moments of truth. It is also worth mentioning that this is one of the few titles whose taglines actually do a pretty darn good job at announcing what it will be about. It is precisely about the moments of truth, about the cracks in one's life, details that at some point overload one, demanding one's full and undivided attention. En kärlekshistoria gives one the dots, but at the end it is one who is left with the job of finding and connecting them into a whole. Once you accomplish that, the magic and the potency of this film is sure to follow.

drjukebox I actually didn't see this movie when it came out, although I was 13 at the time. I just saw it for the first time. I have heard good things about it, so I watched until the end. It is told slowly and beautifully, as we would expect from this director. The boy, the girl and their teenage love are the story. As a backdrop, we have dysfunctional adults, parents, relatives, friends and others, none of who seems to enjoy life even one bit. That is one of the problems with the film. If it is understood that this is depicted from the children's point of view, then it is perhaps OK. But except for the young couple, they're all cardboard, one-dimensional.I always felt this kind of movie has pretensions of realism, that it was made as a protest/alternative to the usual Hollywood fare, to "acting",to cinema as an escape. But it is only realistic to a very limited extent - the central love story. I frankly can't see it as any closer to "reality" than Sound of Music. Some see streaks of dark humor here. I must admit I cannot see that at all. It wouldn't hurt if it had been played as a comedy. I think that would be the only excusable way you could portray a group of people, a neighborhood, a nation this way - with a sense of humor. A modern successor to Andersson is Lukas Moodysson, equally adept with directing children but unable to direct people past adolescence with any depth. And last, folks, this is not a representative view of Sweden at any point in time, although some (including a few Swedes) claim it to be. It was never like this. I know, because I was there.