ONE IS, from time to time, tempted to describe this or that film as looking a little like a Victorian melodrama. You know – when Julia Roberts gets tied to a chair in a burning building or Reese Witherspoon has to fight a starving tiger. That sort of thing.
This diverting, ironically titled Danish thriller is, however, so bizarrely unhinged that it makes Sweeney Toddseem like Little Women. All that's missing is a couple of white slave traders and a mesmerist with a twirled moustache.
It goes something like this. Events begin with Jonas (Anders W Berthelsen), a police photographer, dying on the street like William Holden in Sunset Blvd. We flashback to find Jonas living a largely happy existence with his apparently decent wife. The couple's lives are then disturbed when a car slams into theirs and the occupant, a mysterious young woman, is propelled into a coma.
Jonas visits the hospital and, following a series of bizarre circumstances, finds himself taking on the role of Sebastian, the young woman's missing boyfriend. (So far, so While You Were Sleeping.) Invited to wash the woman's body – "Between her legs," the doctors urge – he becomes close to her and, after she awakes with (you've guessed it) amnesia, actually manages to fall in love.
But trouble is looming. It seems this Sebastian, who last saw the amnesiac in Cambodia, was a diamond smuggler and he might be on his way back to Copenhagen. Things then turn really strange.
Edited with impressive urgency and elegantly shot in cobalt shades, Just Another Love Storycertainly excels as a technical exercise. Whether you can get on board with the story, however, depends on how deeply you believe Ole Bornedal, director of the similarly queasy Nightwatch, has his tongue buried in his cheek. When Jonas arrives in the hospital to find the patient stripped to the waist and splayed like a bruised starfish, two possibilities announce themselves: the director is either a sly joker or a raving maniac.
Run with the first option and you should have a great time.
