Not so great Danes

Just Another Love Story
Running time 100 minutes
Written and directed by Ole Bornedal
Starring Anders W. Berthelsen, Rebecka Hemse, Nikolaj Lie Kaas

Despite all that Hans Christian Andersen stuff, there’s something rotten in Denmark. The real Danes are well known for dour grimaces, downbeat seriousness and relentless, heavy-handed depression, and I can think of no more somber example than the Danish noir thriller sardonically called Just Another Love Story. In the opening shot, a corpse named Jonas lies in a pool of blood on a wet street, rain pouring into his eyes. The corpse proceeds to narrate the story of how he got there. Seems his whole life has been a mess. He wanted to be free, independent and open to an exciting life of mystery and adventure, a photographer of beautiful landscapes. Instead, he ended up with a wife named Mette, who looks like Robin Wright Penn; two kids; and a dreary, dead-end job photographing crime scenes while trying not to throw up. On a rare trip to the country, Jonas and his family have a flat tire, causing a hair-raising multiple collision that leaves the blood-splattered road littered with the severed limbs of dead bodies. The only survivor is a woman named Julia, who is left blind and suffering from amnesia. When the guilt-tortured Jonas visits her in the hospital, her family mistakes him for her old boyfriend Sebastian and urges him to bring her out of her coma. (Little do they know that Sebastian was a drug and diamond smuggler whom the anything-but-angelic Julia has murdered in Hanoi.) Between surreal shots of a phantom figure wrapped in bandages who darts in and out of the hospital corridors in a wheelchair, Jonas kisses Julia, crawls into bed with her and falls so hard that he not only revives her, like Sleeping Beauty, but dumps his family and runs away to her family’s house by the sea. There is no logical explanation for any of this, but as Jonas says, “Life is not just Saturday shopping.” Just when you think the only solution to this tedium is a nap, the bandaged man in the wheelchair turns out to be the real Sebastian, who arrives at the beach claiming to be Jonas. Now it is up to Julia, who is already totally insane, to dispose of them both. The close-ups of bashing his head to shards of skull and flying brains leaves no doubt about who kills Sebastian, but it’s up to you to discover who mows down Jonas in a blast of gunfire, and why. Believe me when I say it’s not worth the effort.

Director Ole Bornedal has obviously been feeding from the trough of his fellow countryman, the loopy Lars von Trier. Pretentious to the core, neither of them knows how to tell a story that makes sense. Mr. Bornedal is sort of a cross between a randy von Trier and a laid-back Quentin Tarantino. It’s a combination made in movie hell, and the resulting meld will leave you puzzled and furious. Unable to follow a plot through coherent narrative design, Mr. Bornedal resorts to a multitude of flashbacks, some real, some imagined—Jonas and Mette, Julia and Jonas, Julia and Sebastian pretending to be Orpheus and Euridyce—laced with moronic dialogue: “If you need to stretch your legs, buy a blow job off a Lithuanian.” In Mr. Bornedal’s Denmark, men are worthless, cheating, self-delusional sods, and women are frustrated and homicidal for good reasons. Discussing life over dead bodies in the morgue, Jonas and his best friend, Frank, break for lunch. The special that day is heart casserole. Just Another Love Story is so weird you don’t know if this is a joke or not. Excruciating.