Just Another Love Story
Dir: Ole Bornedal
Rating: 2.0
KOCH Lorber Films
100 Minutes
Just Another Love Story is a film about a man who pretends to be someone else because he is unhappy with his own painfully domestic lifestyle. This masquerade should raise questions about that nature of identity and whether one can really become someone else and what tolls a double-life can take on a person’s psyche. Maybe I read too many Peter Milligan comics, but those themes are far more interesting to me than the way Ole Bornedal uses the story as a mundane exploration of domestic anxiety. A guy is unhappy, so he cheats. Yawn.
It’s unclear what Just Another Love Story is meant to be. The inconsistent narration gives it a needless touch of noir. The creepy bandaged man in the wheelchair who occasionally shows up to look on threateningly at our characters (leading up to an idiotic twist where we find out said man’s identity) makes it a thriller, though not a particularly thrilling one. The scenes of the protagonist’s crumbling marriage make it a drama. Now, a film can be all these things at once (and should be), but Bornedal does not bother to play them in harmony, instead dropping them into the film like toppings on a pizza, seemingly without a thought of how they would taste in tandem. Maybe if the film were about this character’s identity crisis then the film’s own crisis would be easier to swallow. Instead, the film works out like this: “Here’s the thriller scene… now here’s the domestic drama… Now here’s a cool slow motion car crash sequence that I think David Fincher would make.”
Fincher’s work seems to inform Just Another Love Story, which feels like an attempt to be as grimy as Fight Club — both stories about bored men doing bad things out of frustration with social structure. The creepy bits feel like something out of a more horror-oriented Seven. And I couldn’t wait for the damned thing to end — just like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The only difference is that Bornedal’s film has no excuse for feeling long — it’s only 100 minutes. The biggest difference between Bornedal and Fincher, however, is that Fincher wouldn’t be caught dead using the cheesy green screen effects that open the film. Imagine a man pretending the swim in front of undersea footage.
I’ve just realized the film could have easily (and perhaps better) worked as a romantic comedy. The protagonist has a job (crime scene photographer) that doesn’t really matter to the plot, has obnoxious sex-obsessed friends to make him more likable, and enters a relationship with a girl under false pretenses (she wakes up from a brief coma with slight amnesia, he pretends to be her boyfriend), and eventually must face despair and take responsibility when his ruse is unveiled.
Now imagine Seth Rogen in that.
by Danny Djeljosevic
