“I would never fall in love if I was in a good relationship.” So says one participant in the women’s church group where Copenhagen-based wife and mother Kate (Kathrine Thorborg Johansen) confesses that she’s been having a three-year affair with another man, and doesn’t much regret it. It’s a line that sounds like sturdy, suitably Christian advice, but is it true? Kate’s husband Orla (Simon Sears) is attentive, attractive and empathetic; so is Andreas (Anders Danielsen Lie), the smart, offbeat archaeologist she’s smitten with at first sight. Alternately droll and emotionally acute, Maria Bäck’s “Brave New Love” never presents this romantic triangle as a problem with one solution; it’s considerably less judgmental than the church ladies as it gives its protagonist space to figure out if she really loves two people at once, or just loves nobody — herself included — quite enough.
Premiering in the main competition at Locarno, this is an emotionally intelligent, gently wry character drama of a distinctly Scandi stripe, occupying a comparable arthouse lane to Dag Johan Haugerud’s Oslo Trilogy and recent works by Joachim Trier, albeit with a distinctly feminine point of view behind the camera. It’s not just Danielsen Lie’s reliably interesting presence that brings to mind “The Worst Person in the World” at points, as Bäck’s script (on which Trier collaborator Eskil Vogt was a consultant) ponders similar feelings of middle-class millennial female unrest in a character who simply opted for marriage and family earlier in life. Relatable and discussable, Bäck’s second narrative feature likely reps an easier sell to international distributors than her first, the darkly heightened psychodrama “Psychosis in Stockholm.”
