#LOVE by Ludwig Wüst
Marina Pavido, November 30, 2024
What is love? Reinterpreting Schnitzler’s La Ronde in a post-modern key and at the same time drawing an interesting fresco of the era in which we live, Ludwig Wüst’s #LOVE doesn’t want to give us definitive answers on the subject, but it does, however, make us realise how extraordinarily powerful, how wonderfully painful this feeling can be each time.
The thousand faces of love
Love: one of the most powerful and complex feelings we can ever experience. Love makes us dream, makes us laugh, makes us feel free, but it can also make us suffer terribly. And, in fact, this mysterious, multifaceted feeling can manifest itself in an infinite number of ways, awakening the most diverse emotions each time. Director Ludwig Wüst knows something about this. With his feature film #LOVE, inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s play La Ronde and by Chantal Ackerman’s feature film Toute une Nuit, and presented as a world premiere at the Hof International Film Festival 2024, he has investigated the human soul, showing us not one, but many stories and as many variations of the concept of love itself. Acting as a common thread: Robert Schumann’s song Ich hab im Traum geweinet, based on the poem of the same name by Heinrich Heine (and sung for the occasion by Wüst himself).
Describing love, as we know, is something extremely complex. Ludwig Wüst himself has compared love to an ocean and in his attempt to describe it, it is as if, according to him, he had tried to grasp a portion of water with his hands. Will he have succeeded, at any rate, in this brave undertaking of his? Soon said.
As an incredibly lively and pulsating ensemble film, made over many years, #LOVE is distinguished by a multitude of voices (and directorial approaches) to show us how diverse the world of those who love is. Luka defines herself as a non-binary person. Born in a woman’s body, s/he does not like to classify him/herself in a specific way, depending on what society expects of her/him. This has been a brave and painful path for her/him, and s/he still finds it particularly difficult to deal with certain topics.
A boy, on the other hand, prefers to chat with girls via Skype, but he absolutely does not want to leave home and meet them in person. A woman, after living in the same flat for many years, has to leave her home forever. She is lonely and desperate, but will the virtual affection of her followers ever give her any solace? And again: a man talks to his little daughter on the phone on his way home from work. Together with him, a colleague has just discovered that her boyfriend cheated on her. The anger is strong, the pain too. Nothing and nobody seems to be able to console her.
These, then, are some of the stories we are told in this precious #LOVE. And so, immediately we realise how Ludwig Wüst wanted to give us an exhaustive overview of the world of love, of whatever kind of love it is: love towards oneself, unrequited love, love discovered suddenly and almost by chance. And each of the stories shown to us on the movie screen thus comes to us with all its emotional and communicative power.
Particularly interesting and perfectly in line with the stories staged, in this regard, is the directorial approach chosen by Wüst for his #LOVE. A directorial approach that is at times classical (as when we see Luka during the interview, with a totally white and neutral setting), and that makes mobile phone footage or archive footage (belonging to the director himself, some of which was shot in Egypt even before the shooting of the feature film Egyptian Eclipse his workhorses.
In any case, a strongly realistic and minimalist directorial approach, perfectly in line with the entire filmography of Ludwig Wüst, which reveals in its complex simplicity a great knowledge of the human soul and great affection and respect for the protagonists. What, then, is love? Reinterpreting Schnitzler’s work in a post-modern key and at the same time tracing an interesting fresco of the era in which we live, #LOVE doesn’t want to give us definitive answers about this, but it does however make us realise how extraordinarily powerful, marvellously painful this feeling can be each time.
Link zur Website von Cinema Austriaco