Love is all you need

And now for two other film with Love in the title the first of which is also set in Italy and in Denmark and has Pierce Brosnan following his part in Mama Mia with a much more serious role in Love is All you need not to be confused with the Beatles song All you need is Love.

There are some tenuous connection between the two films. In Mama Mia Pierce returns to the Island of his one true love of some two decades earlier to attend the wedding, unbeknown to him of a young woman who could be his daughter. In Love is all you need “Den skalded frisor” he returns to his first home in Italy, from where he started with his wife to build up a citrus fruit growing estate and export marker which has now grown into a wide range of grocery products from his home base in Denmark, because his son has chosen to hold the wedding at his former childhood home and which he hopes might bring to an end the decades of grief which has made his father into a bad tempered never satisfied always on the move businessman with no time given to enjoyment and relaxation.

Back in Demark, Ida a good hairdresser, has recently ended a successful treatment for breast cancer which involves their removal only to find that her husband not just been having an adulterous affair with his secretary but she is determined to marry him. Ida decides to attend the wedding of her daughter especially as her son is unable to get leave and has to return to active service; fortunately he breaks a limb and therefore is able to get to the wedding after all and is able to play a role in subsequent events.

As in Mama Mia the young couple have rushed into marriage without having time to explore their real and natural feelings and when her fiancée becomes friends with an Italian young man helping to arrange the wedding everyone except those closest to him realises that the young man unknown to himself is in fact homosexual. Into the mix comes Ida’s husband and the girl friend, plus Brosnan’s awful sister in law who has designs on a relationship having always envied her sister.

As in Mama Mia the wedding is called off at the last moment and Ida returns home, briefly to her husband and Brosnan to his business, having re-established a good relationship with his son after telling his sister in law she is the last person he would consider having any kind of relationship. He confronts Ida saying he is going into semi retirement from his business returning to the lemon grove estate of his early life and wanting her to go with him. She says no but eventually walks out of her husband and home and arrives at the Italian estate to see if he still wants her. The film was partly shot around Sorrento on the Amalfi coast, an area I have visited and have a couple of romantic memories.