It wasn’t as much about age as somehow having an amount of pain.” “I felt like if I was going to do this I wanted to have people who felt like they’d really earned it,” Bier plainly states, “and that we’d really be longing for them to somehow get a break in their life. It’s not often we see this genre tackle adult themes and characters so thoughtfully. Philip is a workaholic, emotionally cold man, while Ida, though with an entirely different demeanor, is going through her own mid-life crisis.
But in true Bier fashion, the characters here are emotionally rich and engaging. Similar to Mamma Mia, it becomes clear pretty quickly that the children’s wedding is but a mere pretense for adult playtime. Philip (a dashing-as-ever Pierce Brosnan) is the groom’s father. The man is justifiably angry, only it turns out that they’re both going to Italy for the same reason. Flustered and flying solo for the first time in a long time, Ida literally runs into a man with her car at the airport. This all happens shortly before a trip to Italy for her daughter’s wedding, no less. To prepare for the role, Dyrholm used a technique she developed years ago, before the first time she worked with Bier on In a Better World: “The ‘emotional bank’ is where I write inner monologues for myself so I can feed on the part,” she says. Statuesque and with an incredibly warm affect, Ida returns home to find her husband having sex with a girl their daughter’s age. Recently finishing a round of chemotherapy for breast cancer, she is given an optimistic diagnosis from her doctor. Ida (a sensational Trine Dyrholm) is a woman with a new lease on life. The apt title of Bier’s newest film is Love Is All You Need, an emphatic declaration that fulfills its promises from the sumptuously shot opening frames. “Quite frankly, I have a hard time really seriously engaging with those films.” “I definitely thought: if I’m to make a romantic comedy I don’t want to make it about two 20-year-olds who are great-looking and have great friends and great pasts and great jobs and nice apartments-where all they have to do is meet one another,” says Bier. What better way than with a romantic comedy? For her most recent film, the Danish director wanted to stick with the seriousness of her past work but infuse a slightly lighter tone. Before that was Brothers, the thematically dense film about familial tension during wartime, famously remade starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman. Her last film, In a Better World, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, a category that historically rewards a heavier tone. Susanne Bier is a filmmaker who knows her way around a dramatic situation.
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