About Love (2017)

About Love (2017) is special because it treats romance like a city-wide weather system—unpredictable, sometimes reckless, and impossible to ignore—then lets a handful of very different lives get caught in the same storm. Vladimir Bortko frames Moscow as both glamorous and bruised, where money, loneliness, and desire press in on people until they make choices they can’t neatly explain, and the film’s anthology structure keeps the energy shifting from tender to provocative to quietly heartbreaking. It has the pulse of a thriller in the way each encounter feels like it could tip into disaster, yet it’s ultimately more interested in the strange, human logic of wanting someone at the wrong time. If you prefer love stories that stay polite or morally tidy, this may not be your comfort zone—but if you’re curious about a romance-drama that dares to be messy, modern, and emotionally candid, it’s a compelling watch.

About Love (2017) is clearly trying to be a modern, city-sized mosaic about desire, compromise, and the messy ways people justify what they call “love,” using multiple interlocking stories and a framing lecture to sound smart about it all. The problem is that it often feels more like a grab bag of provocative scenarios than a deeply felt drama, with characters who can come off as concepts or punchlines rather than people you want to follow. Tonally it swerves from romantic to cynical to outright absurd, so if you’re expecting a focused thriller-ish affair story from the synopsis, you may be annoyed by how scattered and talky it is. Still, there are flashes of charm in the anthology format and a few segments land emotionally, so it’s best for viewers who enjoy relationship vignettes and don’t mind moral ambiguity or uneven storytelling.