Squared Love Parent Guide

Minor celebrity and successful womanizer Enzo (Mateusz Banasiu) has been hired to act in a car commercial that his girlfriend, Alicja (Agnieszka Zulewska), is producing. Performing with him in the commercial is Klaudia (Adrianna Chlebicka), an up-and-coming model with a secret. Klaudia is actually an elementary teacher named Monika who is modeling on the side to help her father pay off debts to loan sharks. Struggling to balance her two identities, Monika finds herself falling for Enzo, who seems to be falling for Klaudia.

Is the movie trope where “woman takes out her ponytail and removes her glasses and is suddenly beautiful” outdated? Yes. Yes, it is. Why are glasses and ponytails the symbol of women who don’t care about how they look? Maybe some of us just want to be able to see. All this to say, the feminism of this story is contradictory and complicated. On the one hand, Monika is a woman with agency who makes a conscious choice to turn to modeling in order to help her family. At one point someone tries to slut shame her for “selling her body” and another character stands up to them and refutes their sexism, which is great. On the other hand, Monika declares that she thought Enzo was “the one” after knowing him for a week. Enzo’s brother, Andrzej (Jacep Knap), talks about how a wife’s job is to clean, cook, and take care of children, while he is apparently incapable of contributing to any of these essential tasks. With such a useless husband, it’s no surprise his wife had left him, but in the end, she comes back, and he doesn’t learn any lessons or changes his neanderthal mindset.

Contradictory gender messages aside, there are some positive aspects to Squared Love. The production values for this Polish film are solid, with decent sets, camera work, acting, and editing. The two leads have decent chemistry and I found myself rooting for them to end up together, which should be the most basic goal of a rom-com. If you prefer dubbed versions over reading subtitles, the dubs are well acted and matched. All that said, this is a forgettable movie. There are no interesting themes or subversions of genre norms, and the plot is predictable. If you ask me a week from now, I can already tell I will have no recollection of even seeing it.

As with most entries into this genre, I wouldn’t recommend this film for children, mostly because of the amount of swearing and sexual references. I did appreciate the lack of a sex scene, which is hard to find in this genre. If you really like rom coms, you could do worse, but you could also do a lot better. For me, I give Squared Love a solid “meh” and one half-hearted shrug.