Love Addict

When does love become an obsession? And when are you not in love, but in love with being in love? Danish filmmaker Pernille Rose Grønkjær, who won the 2006 VPRO Joris Ivens Award at IDFA for , depicts several people who lose themselves in life's ultimate aphrodisiac. There's Tracey, an over-analytical, upper-class New Yorker who typifies her own actions as "too -ish." And then there's the other Tracy, decidedly lower class, who begins relationships with losers who are 20 years her junior as a distraction from her own dissatisfying life. "I have the tendency to think I love people," she intimates. Christian is a 40-year-old guitarist who was so dependent in the past that he is now attempting to maintain a long-distance relationship as a healthy alternative. But how well does his theory work in practice? Grønkjær films her subjects primarily in their own homes, where they discuss their problems candidly while performing daily activities or lying on the couch like in an official therapy session. Some of the love addicts have reenacted their painful histories and provide us with an alternative look into their obsessive behavior. A film about the give and take between trust and neglect, dreams and delusions, pleasure and pain, sanity and insanity, and the inescapable fact that in the end we all just want to love and be loved in return.