Review: “Meeting in Rome” by Niclas Bendixen

It is of course nice to see mature love on film. Surely that’s what you call it when the protagonists are over sixty and celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary?

It can withstand that mentioned – depictions of couples welded together and worn down by the years, who can still look at each other with tenderness through wrinkles and age ailments, do not dominate the romantic comedy outright. Such a shame then that the director Niclas Bendixen chose to lean on clichés.

Gerda (Bodil Jørgensen) and husband Kristoffer (Kristian Halken) travel to Rome, a city Gerda has not set foot in for four decades. She wants to see culture and enjoy with all the senses. He mostly wants to complain and eat steak.

the reason for Gerda avoided the eternal city is not only the familiar life puzzle with job, family, obligations, but also the Swedish art teacher Johannes (Rolf Lassgård) and the love story that came to an abrupt end. Now they run into each other once more, which kicks off feelings and thoughts regarding what might have been.

It’s hard to say which is more boring, the Italian clichés with opera singing sweepers and references to “Princess on the Wind” or the tired male types like the grumpy and fallen husband, completely dependent on his wife to run his life for him and perpetually in heat lover, a revelers who show up with a smile and a winer in the middle of the night (not unlike Lassgård’s role in “Andra akten”). Come on.

Art lover Johannes, who must have lived in Italy for over forty years, cannot even pronounce Michelangelo correctly. It’s a minimal detail, of course, but in a film that relies on clichés, it’s the details that separate a successful joke from a bad one.

Even more tiresome is that in the end it is Gerda who must redeem the men while what redeems her own creativity is the city of Rome itself. One would have liked the film to have more…well, maturity than that.