About Love (2015) Spoiler-Free Summary – What It's About

Moscow provides the backdrop for this sprawling, offbeat mosaic of love, unfolding around an open lecture at the Strelka. The lecturer invites listeners to consider attraction through the unlikely lens of biology, poetry, and music, turning a night of ideas into an intimate experiment in which the audience itself becomes part of the conversation. Her framing gives the film a playful, intellectually restless mood: serious questions about desire and devotion are surrounded by wit, awkwardness, romance, and the peculiar energy of a city assembled from many different lives.

Parallel stories follow people whose routes to intimacy are as varied as their circumstances. Himea and Taito share a devotion to Japanese anime and a connection that has so far existed through images rather than ordinary face-to-face familiarity. Liza, an office manager, finds her professional life unsettled by the attention of her employer while her relationship with Grisha is strained by his unemployment and long hours online. At a festival of Russian culture, Miyako, a Japanese visitor with a clear idea of the partner she wants to meet, navigates the romantic expectations and cultural distances of Moscow. Boris, a public figure and graffiti artist, uses the city’s walls to explore his attraction to women, while his private life adds another layer to his creative persona. Around them, a lonely police officer and other chance participants drift toward the same charged atmosphere.

The lecturer’s own history adds a final layer of uncertainty, as her academic performance sits alongside complicated feelings about an ex and the possibility of new intimacy. Rather than offering a single tidy definition of love, the film lets its characters test different versions of it—online, professional, cultural, physical, creative, and unconventional. The result is a provocative, humane city comedy with a dreamlike rhythm, where every introduction raises a question and every connection carries the promise of something stranger, warmer, or more difficult than expected.