Right from the outset, the ironically-titled 'Just Another Love Story' demands a nifty bit of doublethink from its audience: try and suspend your disbelief for the next 90-plus minutes - but don't believe anything you see. Above all, never forget this is only a movie. There may well be some deeper truths embedded in the narrative but, for now, we'll assume this stuff is shallower than the puddles pooling around the body of our fall guy, whose departing soul, a la 'Sunset Blvd''s Joe Gillis, is commenting on its broken vessel, bleeding to death on the sidewalk. "In a moment, they'll bring white tape to mark out my profile." And here's a woman, flapping over him and weeping hysterically, as the rain cascades through the gutters in black rivulets. A body, a dame, assassins as yet unknown and lousy weather: yes, it's a film noir alright. Pencils ready? We're about to tick off some more boxes.
With all the frenzy of The Muppets' Swedish Chef, director Bornedal juggles noirish ingredients - the dupe, the femme fatale, the mysterious suitcase - and stirs them into a boiling black stew of obsession, murder and stolen identities. The principals, whose trajectories will collide figuratively and literally on a Copenhagen motorway, are Jonas, a crime scene photographer, listlessly married with children and suffering the usual existential crises; and Julia, the beautiful but damaged daughter of a megabucks publisher, initially glimpsed hiding out from Triads in a seedy Hanoi hotel, and engaged in a fevered spot of gunplay with her psychotic lover. Jonas clearly requires a femme fatale to really help screw up his life, and right on cue, the distraught Julia, on the run in Denmark, clips his stalled car, crashes, and slips into a coma.
When Jonas shows up at the hospital, Julia's parents mistake him for Sebastian, the dodgy boyfriend they've never met. And with the knowledge gleaned from Interpol that Sebastian has been shot point blank in Vietnam, a bewitched Jonas draws back the screens of opportunity and assumes the 'dead' man's identity, waking the semi-naked Julia with a fairytale kiss - and more; the patient has become pregnant.
Blinded and amnesiac, she initially buys Jonas's deception, but memories begin seeping through of violent encounters with Sebastian in Southeast Asia. What really happened out there? Who's the figure in the wheelchair haunting the hospital corridors with a bandaged face, like Claude Rains in 'The Invisible Man'? Can dead boyfriends come back, blown in like an ill wind from the East? Or is Jonas going insane through the pressure of maintaining a double life? This can't end well.
"A beautiful woman and a mystery," muses Jonas, "Isn't that how all film noirs begin?" The metafictive Just Another Love Story (which often resembles a Danish Dennis Potter, with its hospitals and obsessions) doesn't so much wear its influences heavily as constantly barrack you with nods, winks and a dig in the ribs. And if this were merely some playful, post-modern exercise featuring striking visuals, lurid full-frontals and Bornedal's trademark mortuary humour, we'd probably still buy it. But there's a bit more to this than just a lot of reflexive razzamatazz.
The story deals in dualities: dual identities, dual lives - and that duality extend to the film's technique and tone. Bornedal masterfully folds visual and aural elements from one scene into another to suggest memories, inner-lives and other-lives. In one passage, Jonas denies having an affair to his wife, but the scene is soundtracked by the fluttering cries of his and Julia's lovemaking. A cute trick, sure, but the film never allows its considerable style to swamp stuff like character or heart. Though hardly Dogme, it nevertheless keeps one boot mired in sober reality, eliciting some authentically heartbreaking performances; Charlotte Fich, in particular, is superb as the cheated Mette, struggling to comprehend how her husband has managed to slip clean away from her.
A scene in which Jonas' mid-life crisis culminates in the middle of the family's weekly shopping run is both appallingly sad - and bravura direction. "Is this a good place for it?" demands Mette, barely keeping a lid on her mounting panic, as Jonas signals his split. "No place is good," replies Jonas truthfully, as their row spills out into the supermarket car park. Meanwhile, of all of this is intercut with shots of Jonas whisking his new bride to her father's country mansion, while the presiding soundtrack of Vivaldi's ebullient 'Spring' from 'The Four Seasons' provides a perfectly corny accompaniment to one scene - and an ironic counterpoint to the other. Rebirth is painful indeed.
As with Dennis Potter's 'The Singing Detective', this is a film about real people with real middle-aged problems - who just happen to have found themselves locked in the contrivance of a film noir. Its self-conscious, role-playing nature also starts to make sense with the discovery that this is something of a cathartic exercise for the director - a way of publicly working through his guilt following his own admitted marital infidelity. "I left my family but not my children," says Bornedal. "It is not an ideal situation - it is however better than marriages without love." In other words, 'Jonas - c'est moi'.
In the hands of another director, one with less integrity, this might have sported a ludicrously upbeat punchline, an attempt to cover-up through fiction. The fantasy of some Hollywood fat cat, excusing his tawdry affairs with a ripping tale of dangerous dames. But it's Bornedal's movie, and his penance is in plain sight. He wants us to see it - needs us to see it. It is why he has chosen film noir to beat himself up with. In film noir, that most moralistic of genres, infidelity does not go unpunished. The film is also a reminder to us, whether single, in a relationship or looking for an escape route, that love exists as much in the imagination as in the heart.
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