Reviews

The Ove Within

CONNIE KUHNS

For Ove, the central character in the film A Man Called Ove there is nothing ahead but frustration, disappointment and sadness. “It’s just chaos when you’re not here,” he says to his newly departed wife as he lays flowers on her grave. Tragedy has remade him and he is unrecognizable to himself; to his neighbours and friends, Ove has become an irritable, isolated old man. Ove looks for ways to join his wife in death and has conversations with the pregnant woman who has just moved in next door with her family. The noise and happy chaos of her life makes her resistant to his anger and hopelessness as he keeps failing at his attempts to reach the afterlife. A Man Called Ove isn’t dark (it was released on Christmas Day in Sweden in 215). The combination of pathos, humour and good will makes this a deeply universal film and so much more than a simple all-you-need-is-love story. Lucky or unlucky, life happens. We either know a man like Ove, or he’s hiding inside us. We observe a man’s behaviour, but what do we know until we ask? This film is worth every cinematic minute.

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CONNIE KUHNS

Connie Kuhns has a forty-year history as an essayist, journalist, photographer and broadcaster. Her essay “Strange Women,” (Geist 95), about women in Vancouver’s early punk scene, was a finalist for a National Magazine Award;  “Last Day in Cheyenne” (Geist 84) was named a “Notable Essay of 2012” in The Best American Essay series and a finalist for a Western Magazine Award;  and other essays have been finalists in publications ranging from the LA Review to Prism International to the New York Times Modern Love column, and the Southampton Review Frank McCourt Memoir Prize.  

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