Film

As he did in his 1994 film, Nattevagten (and its subsequent English language remake, Nightwatch), Ole Bornedal has crafted another paean to a morgue and to dead—or otherwise prone and horizontal—bodies. Jonas (Berthelsen) is a forensic photographer who spends his days snapping corpulent corpses and his nights having suburban sex with his wife (Fich). Things tick along with quiet desperation until a traffic accident, when Jonas becomes smitten with Julia (Hemse), a woman in a coma.

Mistaken by Julia’s family for her boyfriend, Sebastian (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), Jonas nurses Julia back to health through sponge baths, which is when this particular love story allies itself more with Talk to Her than While You Were Sleeping. Indeed, the opening scene establishes that Just Another Love Story is more concerned with crime than romance; Jonas narrates his own death, calling the events that precipitated it distinctly film noirish. It’s clunky, to be sure, but handy shorthand for the flashbacks, femme fatale, mysterious suitcase and triads with Ho Chi Minh facial hair that follow. Bornedal injects plenty of gallows humor to keep things light, and a fair amount of bloody, full-frontal nudity to maintain just the right quotient of queasiness.