If you’re a married man, don’t fall for another woman, pretend to be someone else or take a suitcase that doesn’t belong to you. That’s the moral behind Danish writer-director Ole Bornedal’s lurid psychological thriller.
The ironically-titled Just Another Love Story works effectively when it focuses on the dilemmas facing police crime scene photographer Jonas (Anders W. Berthelsen), but it loses clarity, and coherence, when it veers into neo-noir fantasy.
The opening scene shows a bloodied Jonas lying on a rain-soaked street, evidently dying. How he got there is a convoluted story involving mistaken identity, drugs, diamonds smuggling, lies and betrayal.
Initially Jonas appears happily married with a wife- he smugly calculates they’ve made love 2,000 times- and two kids. But his curiosity is piqued after he’s involved in a horrific car accident and he goes to the hospital to check on the only survivor, Julia (Rebecka Hemse). Her relatives assume he’s her boyfriend Sebastian, whom she met while travelling through Asia, and he doesn’t bother to correct them. Conveniently she’s in a coma, has lost 90% of her vision and has amnesia. In a truly icky scene, a nurse asks him to wash his supposed girlfriend under her armpits and between her legs. He’s soon falling in lust as Julia stages a remarkable recovery and he learns via Interpol that the real Sebastian (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is dead.
You just know Jonas can’t maintain the pretence of a double life for too long, and as Julia starts to get her memory back, he’s going to pay a terrible price. Berthelsen gives a commanding performance as a basically decent guy whose mid-life crisis spirals out of control after he makes a couple of bad choices.
Bornedal cleverly maintains the intrigue and suspense using flashbacks, flash-forwards, dream sequences and slow-motion incidents, although it takes several leaps of logic to reach the conclusion. And his penchant to inject surreal elements such as a mysterious fellow wrapped in mummy-style bandages is both pretentious and a distraction from the core story.
