Food and Romance (Appelin, 2022)

Food and Romance tackles some weighty themes, and it is to be commended for sidestepping some of the most clichéd plot points of the genre. But it is ultimately too heavy to work as a comedy and too tidy to be effective as a drama.

Karin (Marie Richardson) is struggling through a series of late mid-life crises. Her husband, Sten (Björn Kjellman) while not an ogre, has settled into the cultural expectation of wife-as-caregiver rather than a partner. Their daughter is turning forty and vacillates between expecting her mom to take care of her and blaming her mom for everything wrong in her life. When Sten becomes physically incapacitated at exactly the same moment that Karin discovers a probable infidelity, she begins to reevaluate her life choices while feeling yet more trapped in a loveless marriage.

Karin reconnects with an irritating but freer-spirited friend, and they end up in a cooking class with one of those charmingly ill-tempered chefs (Peter Stormare) who also happens to be single.

From that moment, you can pretty much guess where the movie is going to end up. It’s just a question of how it is going to get there. Food and Romance is better than an American version of this material would probably be, but that just serves to highlight some of the problems inherent in the genre. One big difference is that in an American movie, the mom would be 40 and the daughter would be 20, so their conversations about the nature of the mother-daughter relationship would be far more superficial and one-sided. The husband would also be more of a self-conscious hypocrite so that the audience felt license to root for the affair over the marriage.

The film raises the emotional stakes by pitting the concept of marriage against separation rather than simply contrasting one potential partner with another. That may or may not make it resonate more deeply with some demographics (age/nationality), but then rather than allowing the plot to be a resolution of that conflict, the film chooses to claim that everyone gets what they secretly want. This suggests that the problems and hurts of infidentlity and separation are caused not by betrayal but secrecy — that if we were more grown up and willing to be honest, we would voluntarily give up the tradition of monogamy rather than fight for it.

I don’t really believe that is true, so the second half of the movie strikes me as false. But I’ve had friends or acquaintances who have ended marriages, even long ones, and expressed similar sentiments. So Food and Romance does reflect an attitude towards aging and marriage that is out there and that some might find solace in seeing relfected back to them on film.