"Beautiful girl and the unsolved mystery - good starting point for a noir film", mentions to the everyman Jonas, husband and father, the hero of "Just another love story", one of his friends, urging him to think twice before immersing into that mystery. And soon, the movie turns out as a thriller in the Hitchcock's and Coen Brothers' traditions with the main character taking the sudden choices in order to run from the stalled relationship that lost its initial appeal, from unfulfilling job, from life that leads nowhere to a romantic passionate love and exciting new possibilities.
Derivative - that's the word that majority of nay-sayers use when commenting on this film. But its writer/director Ole Bornedal does not hide throughout the picture that he has made a noir film, or, rather, Neo-noir: Danish style that characterizes by postmodernist self-reflection and consciously refers to the works of past and present. There are all ingredients here you would expect in a noir film: twists, turns, wrong or questionable choices the main character takes and where they would lead him. There are mysterious young woman with a dark past and a sinister stranger in bandages, gloomy deserted landscapes and long corridors with flickering neon lights. The scenes of killings and beatings are rather cruel and violent, erotic encounters - explicit, and the ending is thousands miles away from a Hollywood happy ending. But for Ole Bornedal, the creator of Just Another Love Story, the most important message that he wanted to convey to the audience was that everybody carries a dream and the need for a self-fulfillment in life - that life very rarely offers. His dark, violent, moody noir reflects on the wishes, fantasies, desires that seem have been lost as time goes on but never disappear and only wait patiently for a sudden spark to ignite them and to start unquenchable, all-consuming disastrous flames.
The film is over the top in its second part but by that time you have been already so involved in the story and glued to the screen that you are willing to forgive whatever problems and deep holes the plot has and how many films and books Just Another Love Story freely refers to. It could be described as Talk to Her While She Was Sleeping but remember not to mess with the Chinese Triads because this is No Country for Old Men. Ole Bornedal's neo-noir also brings to memory the mystery novels by French writers, the duo Boileau- Narcejac and Sébastien Japrisot. The former are the authors of the novels Les Diaboliques and Vertigo. Before they became the classics of cinema, they had been and still are highly popular books. "Trap for Cinderella" by Sébastien Japrisot tells about a young woman who has lost her identity due to amnesia in the fatal fire accident and does not remember anything that led to the disaster including the truth about being a murderer or a victim or both. The common feature of all mentioned novels and their screen adaptations is assuming somebody else's personality. But "No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main." And giving up your identity, pretending to be someone else, thus accepting their connections with this world however mysterious, sinister, dangerous those connections may be, inevitably leads to the devastating results. It is just a guess whether Bornedal is familiar with these books but the theme of Identity is the most prominent in his film, which is a riveting thriller, an impossible love-story, a social commentary on the middle-aged angst, as much as a philosophical meditation on the possibility/impossibility to live someone else's life, and accepting your own.
Derivative - that's the word that majority of nay-sayers use when commenting on this film. But its writer/director Ole Bornedal does not hide throughout the picture that he has made a noir film, or, rather, Neo-noir: Danish style that characterizes by postmodernist self-reflection and consciously refers to the works of past and present. There are all ingredients here you would expect in a noir film: twists, turns, wrong or questionable choices the main character takes and where they would lead him. There are mysterious young woman with a dark past and a sinister stranger in bandages, gloomy deserted landscapes and long corridors with flickering neon lights. The scenes of killings and beatings are rather cruel and violent, erotic encounters - explicit, and the ending is thousands miles away from a Hollywood happy ending. But for Ole Bornedal, the creator of Just Another Love Story, the most important message that he wanted to convey to the audience was that everybody carries a dream and the need for a self-fulfillment in life - that life very rarely offers. His dark, violent, moody noir reflects on the wishes, fantasies, desires that seem have been lost as time goes on but never disappear and only wait patiently for a sudden spark to ignite them and to start unquenchable, all-consuming disastrous flames.
The film is over the top in its second part but by that time you have been already so involved in the story and glued to the screen that you are willing to forgive whatever problems and deep holes the plot has and how many films and books Just Another Love Story freely refers to. It could be described as Talk to Her While She Was Sleeping but remember not to mess with the Chinese Triads because this is No Country for Old Men. Ole Bornedal's neo-noir also brings to memory the mystery novels by French writers, the duo Boileau- Narcejac and Sébastien Japrisot. The former are the authors of the novels Les Diaboliques and Vertigo. Before they became the classics of cinema, they had been and still are highly popular books. "Trap for Cinderella" by Sébastien Japrisot tells about a young woman who has lost her identity due to amnesia in the fatal fire accident and does not remember anything that led to the disaster including the truth about being a murderer or a victim or both. The common feature of all mentioned novels and their screen adaptations is assuming somebody else's personality. But "No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main." And giving up your identity, pretending to be someone else, thus accepting their connections with this world however mysterious, sinister, dangerous those connections may be, inevitably leads to the devastating results. It is just a guess whether Bornedal is familiar with these books but the theme of Identity is the most prominent in his film, which is a riveting thriller, an impossible love-story, a social commentary on the middle-aged angst, as much as a philosophical meditation on the possibility/impossibility to live someone else's life, and accepting your own.