Sensitive rendering of a teenage romance with absurdist touches, nice camera-work and nice score featuring nice period songs. One thing that bothered me throughout was the forced contrast between the youngsters' idyll and the ostentatiously existential world of adults. I don't know anything about life in Sweden in the sixties, but such degree of mediocrity, frustration and (male) aggressiveness seemed to me beyond belief - rather a funhouse of abstractions of modern angst than a sample of real people.But maybe the teenagers were not meant by Andersson to be as innocent as they seem. Driven by the same needs and desires as the adults, i.e. to play with others, to touch them/lean on them, to defend one's position in the pecking order ... - might they be models of the same egocentrism, albeit in a larval stage ?Very good transfer from Artificial Eye.

En kärlekshistoria (A Love Story) is very much better than anything I have read about it would lead me to expect, and the reason it is so much better is something many who otherwise love the movie criticize it for: that it is NOT just a love story. It is NOT just about the two ethereally innocent and lovely pubescent lovers but about the ugly adults who surround them.If this movie HAD been only about Pär and Annika, it would indeed have been an extraordinary and breathtakingly beautiful love story, and it would have fulfilled the promise of its title and the hopes of very many viewers. But it is a Roy Andersson movie, and even as a fresh-out-of-school twenty-something making his very first feature-length movie, his genius for cutting through illusion to the hardness under the surface of life was fully in evidence.Those who see En kärlekshistoria as being radically different from his recent movies - Songs from the Second Floor and You, The Living - and even from Giliap, made only a few years after En kärlekshistoria, are wearing blinders, choosing to see only the loveliness on its surface and denying the hard reality under and all around the loveliness.ALL of Andersson's movies are like this one. ALL of them are beautiful on one level and devastatingly harsh on another. That is what makes him such an extraordinary movie-maker and his movies so extraordinarily rewarding to watch. Without the hardness under the surface, the beauty on the surface would be empty and of only minimal, temporary value. It might entertain and delight us, but it would not teach us anything about our own world or change us in any way. We would have been made to feel good for a few minutes, but we would not have gotten anything of lasting value from the experience.So the ugly adults HAVE to be in this Love Story, because without them this is nothing but a daydream, a fleeting glimpse into the world of young love, a world that is open to us for only a few months as we are making the astounding transition from childhood, like butterflies emerging unsteadily from our cocoons. That innocent, pure and lovely love is not available to adults, or even to adolescents. Once the cocoon has been sloughed and the wings dried and warmed, the butterfly flies off into its "real" life, and our fragile, emerging innocence is gone forever.The adults in En kärlekshistoria give its love story the context it needs, call our attention to and accentuate its purity and loveliness, and show us how transient that loveliness is. The point (only one of many) Andersson is making (and we do not want to see) is that Pär and Annika are going to turn out to be just like their parents and other relatives: hard, selfish, stupid, abusive, and ugly. They cannot turn out any other way, because - like it or not - that is how we adults are.By showing us what Pär and Annika will be like in just a very few months (the bully who beat up Pär is only slightly older but already like the adults), Andersson gives us an invaluable frame for the lovely snapshot he took of them at their loveliest. That moment, that loveliness, is just as real as and certainly more pleasant to look at than the other, adult reality, but the two sharply contrasting realities need each other to make life tolerable. That contrast is what makes En kärlekshistoria a work of genius and power, much more than just a sweet but vapid story of young love.

One of the most realistic portraits of teen-age love I've ever scene. Sensual, sad, and funny. Two terrific lead performances. Very different from Andersson's later, much more surreal films. This is grounded in an amazingly universal reality.The only weak spot is how the secondary stories of the grown ups around them take over the last third of the film. These are interesting and entertaining characters, but it's a bit like 'Romeo and Juliet' suddenly became about Friar Tuck. I get that Andersson is exploring class and politics in Sweden, and the point is to set the kids' innocence against that. But I still feel it's a bit unbalanced.But all that aside, this is a film I love for the way it captures that moment where love becomes something real, and sensuality becomes a part of your life.

I had seen Roy Andersson's latest film "Sånger från andra våningen" (2000) before I saw this. Both were highly acclaimed in Sweden. I had expected quite a different film this time; after all, it was a love story, and since the director were younger when he made "En kärlekshistoria" I thought it would be somewhat more easygoing. That wasn't at all the case.There are several similarities between the two. There is a main plot about a 15 year old boy, working as a car mechanic assistant, who falls in love with an even younger girl. But that isn't the only thing this movie is about. Rather, it seems like Andersson shows a pessimistic view of the general problems of love in our society; lonely people, couples that quarrel, marriages that break up. Similar to his later film, it is shot slowly and very beautifully, and with a dominant depressive mood floating over it. This particularly depressive feeling which I dare to refer to as a mood characteristic of the whole Swedish society. The conversations are also very Swedish. It could be seen as criticism of the society; or just a twisted documentation of it with black humour (probably more plausible).I couldn't stand that the topic of love was described in this way. Love is the highest source of happiness. This film is completely without exaltation. Again; very Swedish.3/5.