It was nice to end my first Toronto International Film Fest with a movie with a happy ending. And unless you’re a conservative Catholic, Patrik Age 1.5 (or “Patrik 1,5″, if you’re outside North America) is certainly that.

Patrik Age 1.5 might be a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy if you omit some of the larger details. A recently married couple, one of them with a teenage daughter from a previous marriage, move to a suburban neighbourhood of white picket fences and frequent block parties, where they seek to fit in and start a family through adoption. The rom-com twist is that instead of the one and a half year old Patrik they’re expecting to get, their Patrik (played by Thomas Ljungman) is actually a 15 year old orphan with a police record that includes aggravated assault and knife-wielding. Formulaic hijinks ensue, everyone learns a lesson, group hug at the end, right?

Maybe, but the married couple in question are also both men, Gorän (Gustaf Skarsgård) and Sven Skoogh (Torkel Petersson).

Gorän and Sven live in a society that was good enough to allow them to be married, but one where their neighbours shun them, neighbourhood kids repeatedly vandalize their property and scream “homo!” at them, and one father threatens to kill Gorän, a doctor trying to immunize a group of schoolkids, if he ever touches his child again. Director Ella Lemhagen manages to raise issues of intolerance and homophobia without beating you over the head with them. It’s not any kind of polemic against an intolerant society or an “it’s so hard to be gay” statement, it’s how things are for Gorän and Sven, a reality they have to live with every day.

Young Patrik is, at least initially, no different than the neighbourhood kids, calling them both pedophiles and threatening that Sven will be sorry if he tries anything with him. Patrik drives a wedge between the happy couple. Gorän tries increasingly to reach out to him and break through his tough guy facade, while Sven grows increasingly distant and drinks heavily. Sven leaves when Gorän insists that Patrik stay until social services can find him a decent family rather than sending him back to an orphanage that Patrik says he would rather die than return to. Patrik softens as he starts working in Gorän’s garden, and his skills are such that he’s soon being hired by people all across the block. Patrik also gets the best line in the movie; he tells Gorän, over a shot of Patrik lying in bed with Sven’s goth-kid daughter, who’s talking a silent Patrik’s ear off, that “we just talk. She says I understand her.” Gorän revels in the newfound closeness with his teenage ward, but Sven’s absence leaves a hole in his life. Suffice to say, like many rom-coms before it, it all ends very happily despite the challenges faced, and all the characters learn a little something.

The beauty of Patrik Age 1.5 is that it manages this without the nauseating schmaltz too many rom-coms lapse into. It feels more genuinely sweet than most, thanks largely to the performances of it’s three main characters, particularly Gustaf Skarsgård as Gorän. It might be difficult for the conservative crowd or anybody who’s against gay marriage to watch, and if seeing a dude making out with another dude on screen makes you uncomfortable you might want to close your eyes at times. But it’s a heartwarming little movie with characters that feel real that manages to avoid undue sappiness or, just as importantly, trying to force a lesson about tolerance.

4.5/5 for Patrik Age 1.5. My girlfriend called it “the ultimate date movie.” As a Swedish movie with English subtitles, don’t expect to be able to take your girlfriend to see it at your local Cineplex anytime soon, but try to see it if you can.

Bonus Reviews:

Lymelife - Alec Baldwin, Timothy Hutton, Cynthia Nixon and two Culkins, Rory and Kieran, star in a tale of dysfunctional small-town family life. The chemistry between the younger Culkin and the girl next door (Emma Roberts) as they struggle with growing up, their teenage sexuality, and their overbearing, flawed parents is solid, and Hutton is great as Roberts’s father who’s been stricken with Lyme disease. Director/co-writer Derick Martini was there for a Q&A after the screening, and insisted that it’s all about life and it’s constant changes, but much as I like slice of life-style movies, this one is a little too dull for my tastes, and the surprise, intense ending didn’t quite fit. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see this receive some “Oscar buzz” and all that, but the only one who really deserves it is Hutton. 3.5/5

L’instinct de Mort (somehow translated to “Public Enemy Number One” in English), Part One: Semi-historical French gangster film follows Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) as he returns to France in 1959 from fighting with the French army in Algeria and falls in with a rough crowd. Mesrine and his friend Paul (Gilles Lelouche) and Guido (Gerard Depardieu), sort of a Parisian Godfather-type, commit many violent crimes. Mesrine gets married, is arrested, goes straight, and ends up returning to crime. After a truly difficult to watch scene where he beats his wife Sofia (Elena Anaya), he goes to Canada to lie low after a robbery, falls in with Jean-Paul Mercier (Roy Dupuis), an FLQ member, and both get arrested and tortured, escape from prison, and try to break the rest of the inmates out. Nicely presents the period and history, but is also uncomfortably violent at times. Mesrine is the hero, but charming and funny as he is, he’s also a sociopath who does terrible things. Still, I’d watch part two, if only to find out what the point of the scene during the opening credits was, which had nothing to do with the rest of the film…4/5

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