Dir.
Ole Bornedal, Denmark, 2007, 104 mins, in Danish with subtitles
Cast:
Anders W. Berthelsen, Rebecka Hemse, Nikolaj Lie Kaas
Review by
Laurie Munslow
With its tongue-in-cheek title, Just Another Love Story is anything but a conventional romantic film. From the opening scene with the lead character Jonas (Anders W. Bertelson) dying on the pavement in the pouring rain while narrating his own death, it's clear that this is more neo-noir than romantic escapism. As the camera spins above him, the feeling is of vertigo - perhaps a homage to Hitchcock's classic tale of power and fantasy.
The film tells the tale of Jonas, a crime scene photographer who is desperate to escape his morbid job and mundane family life. While his attractive wife Mette (Charlotte Fich) and his two children go about their everyday reality, he fantasises about travelling the world and photographing landscapes – anything but his monotonous existence. He dreams in bright, vivid colours; his normal life is a dirge of muted greys and greens.
So when the free-spirited, well-travelled Julia (Rebecka Hemse) enters his life, having fled some traumatic event in Vietnam, Jonas turns the equally traumatic circumstances of their meeting to his advantage. Their paths first cross when he unwittingly causes the shocking car crash that puts her in a coma and leaves her blind for much of the story. Feeling guilty, he visits her in hospital, where her family mistake him for her missing boyfriend, Sebastian (Nikolaj Lie Kaas). Entranced by Julia and keen to escape his own identity, Jonas almost effortlessly assumes this new role. When Julia wakes up, blind and suffering amnesia, she too believes him to be her boyfriend. He begins concocting their shared memories, turning himself into the person he wants to be. As the boundaries between his real and fantasy life begin to blur, he happily assumes the role of Sebastian for Julia. “Sebastian's face took hold,” reveals his narration, “and Jonas disappeared.”
His CSI friends egg him on, with his best friend Frank (Dejan Cukic) even using his crime contacts to find out the lowdown on Sebastian and contribute little insights into the intrigue: “beautiful women and a mystery – isn't that how all film noirs start?” Certainly meeting Julia changes his life, but whatever she's running from begins to catch up with her, as does her memory. He soon realises his stolen identity is no fairytale – and that Sebastian's revenge will put both their lives in danger.
What follows is a confusing mix of fantasy and reality that culminates in scenes of escalating intensity and violence. For Jonas, the two begin to overlap, as he spends more and more of his normal life fantasising about his new one. Conversations with Julia take over the soundtrack, uppermost in his thoughts even while he's having dinner with his family and friends. Despite some contrived twists and turns, the film explores how easily people can mislead and be misled. “We have all stumbled over the thought: what if I was someone else?” says director Ole Bornedal, whose previous work includes the acclaimed Nightwatch. “My Jonas in Just Another Love Story is that dreamer in us all...Jonas just goes too far: he doesn't just leave the life he knows – he lies his way to a new one, stealing another man's identity and taking his woman in the process.”
The film ends as it began, with Jonas dying on the pavement, once again evoking the imagery of Hitchock's Vertigo. But here, Jonas has been playing the role of Jimmy Stewart's Scottie as well as Kim Novak's Madeline/Judy character. And like Judy, Jonas pays for his deceitful happiness – with his life.
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