Renovation
My favourite film from the section.
There are martyred love stories like In the Mood for Love where stable romances are almost but not quite rocked by potential ones. And then there are the destructive lost affairs like Passages (Ira Sachs, 2023) and The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier, 2021), where the protagonists destroy relationships with loving people as they sort out confused aspirations and strange new desires. Renovation, with its title that promises both change and stability, fits somewhere in between the two 21st-century romantic traditions.
Lithuanian-Norwegian translator Ilona (Žygimantė Elena Jakštaitė) has a crisis at 30, right around the time she and her boyfriend, Matas (Šarūnas Zenkevičius), move in together. His ringless proposal doesn’t help either: he asks her to marry him so nonchalantly that she doesn’t realise he actually proposed. To Ilona’s surprise, the apartment building needs some renovations and a hunky Ukrainian construction worker named Oleg (Roman Lutskyi) begins to catch her eye and who could blame her?
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