Everyone feels like they’re inventing love, the first time they experience it. Mika is no exception. The merry-eyed, free-spirited heroine of sunswept, pulsatingly youthful Swedish love story “The Heart,” is played by Fanni Metelius (“Force Majeure“) in a light, summery performance all the more remarkable because Metelius is also the writer and debut director here. Mika is a sexually liberated young woman who, when we meet her, has pronounced precociously absolutist views on relationships: They’re not for her. “I couldn’t imagine anything worse than being the ‘sad girlfriend'” her chatty voiceover tells us. So she’s a popular, pretty millennial, studying photography at art college, falling uncomplicatedly into bed with this guy or that, partying amid neon and glitter and crop tops, and decamping to Ibiza with her girls to do whip-its and engage in some hedonism therapy when the eponymous organ gets broken. Somehow, she’s not insufferable.
It’s a good thing we like her because, in the grand scheme, there is little at stake in “The Heart” except for the gradual, wistful wising-up of its attractive characters. Mika meets aspiring musician Tesfay (Ahmed Berhan) and falls hard for him. That she finally confesses to wanting to be his girlfriend only after she discovers the relative emptiness of sex with other guys, is an irony not lost on Tesfay: “Only you would tell me you want to get serious by telling me you slept with someone else” he says with a rueful smile.
But Tesfay is as smitten as Mika and they move in together. There is a honeymoon period where they can’t keep their hands off each other and every new joint endeavor, from the buying of a bed to the collision of tooth-brushing schedules, is a little adventure in mutual discovery. And then there’s the gradual slackening off, the maturation of dizzy infatuation into longer-term companionship which itself becomes the beginning of an imperceptible decline into complacency. Tesfay’s fledgling music career falters, a Playstation-aided inertia sets in and he starts to lose interest in sex. Mika is convinced it’s something she’s done and thinks about visiting a therapist, to which her mother scoffs, “The man has the problem, but why does the woman assume she’s the one who needs therapy?”
That’s about as far as scorching social commentary goes in “The Heart.” Tesfay is black and Mika is white but racial issues are never even glancingly mentioned, although the buoyant, instagrammable photography from DP Maja Dennhag is engagingly attuned to the characters’ physical beauty and the aesthetic contrast of his bare skin against hers, the commingling of her tousled blonde locks with his long thick dreads. Mika and Tesfay are written and unselfconsciously performed, as people rather than types – and the slow dissolution of their relationship, despite their deep mutual affection, is easy to invest in as a result.
As Mika gradually turns into one of those “sad girlfriends” she used to despise, Tesfay finally confesses to low-level depression, and it’s one of those ordinary little heartbreaks for which no one is to blame and from which no one, no matter how much they care for you, can rescue you. “I want to disappear,” says Tesfay, and it’s like an admission that he’s withdrawing from the relationship not because there’s not enough love, but almost because there’s too much. It’s hard to disappear when someone else sees you so well.
Modest though her debut is, Metelius has achieved a fine, beguiling balance. The tone is kept light and bittersweet, so she’s hardly making any claim to great importance or originality in her narrative. But nor does she apologize for the story’s slightness, displaying a sincere and persuasive confidence that makes it worth telling nonetheless. Perhaps, like first love, this mixture of shyness and boldness is a kind of freshness you can only ever achieve with your first film — and not often then. But there is talent and promise in how Metelius spins a heartfelt and honest tale out of familiar elements, and even makes a virtue of that familiarity. If the learning curve Mika undergoes is not exactly grand, it is deeply sympathetic, as surely many of us will have made a similar discovery for ourselves at some point. The songs and stories and romance movies lie: Love is never all you need. [B]
Crossing Europe is a festival held annually in April in Linz, Austria, which celebrates the brightest and most idiosyncratic filmmaking from across the continent, with a particular focus on European socio-political themes.