Friday, May 31, 2013

Just Another Love Story - Movie Review

This one took a month to complete - not because it's boring (it's anything but that) but simply because it happened so. It's a Danish film with English sub titles. Opens dramatically with the narrator lying in a pool of blood in the rain. Turns out he is Jonas, a police crime scene photographer with two kids and an attractive wife.

When Jonas's old car stops on the road suddenly, it leads to a car crash that leaves one car occupant instantly dead and the other occupant, Julia, an attractive young woman, comatose, speechless, memoryless and almost blind. A guilty Jonas visits her in the hospital. Her wealthy family mistakes him for her boyfriend Sebastian whom they have never met. Jonas plays along, helps the girl recover, falls in love with her, falls out with his wife and moves in with her family almost.

One day the boyfriend returns - a crazy chap dealing with diamonds and who has tried to outsmart his bosses with no luck. He figures that they'll kill him so he fakes being dead and enters a death pact with Julia. Only Julia survives the pact. But then the accident happens and she loses her memory and does not know who is the real Sebastian. The real Sebastian turns up as Jonas and that makes things murkier for the real Jonas. Julia survives the real Sebastian and so does Jonas. Julia also recovers her memory, her eyesight and in her new clarity also realises that she does not love Jonas the ordinary crime photographer. But when Jonas visits home and his wife gives him back the suitcase that Julia's car was carrying at the time of the accident, Jonas is mistaken for Sebastian by the mafia and shot dead. That's it.

Full of weird twists, crazy characters and stuff that people on the edge get into, 'Just Another Love Story' is something that you watch with the same sense as you watch accidents on the road. You know it will shock you, gross you, but you still do with some fatalistic itch.

But thanks to this movie I read up on the legend of Orpheus and Euridyce from Greek mythology because the two - Julia and Sebastian - talk of being like Orpheus and Eurdyce in their death pact. Legend is that Orpheus, a legendary musician, loses his wife to a satyr. He goes to the underworld playing soulful music on his lyre that moves even the hardest of hearts. The underworld gods Hades and Persephone are moved by his music too (he is supposedly the only one to move them so), and allow him to take Euridyce back on one condition - that he must walk ahead on the way back and not turn back until they reach the upper world. Euridyce will follow him. Orpheus agrees and does not turn back until he reaches the upper world. He turns back as soon as he reaches forgetting that the condition was that 'until both reach the upper world'. He thus loses Euridyce forever.

In the movie Julia tells Sebastian the nut case, who quotes from this legend, that Orpheus must walk ahead and she will follow - in the death pact. Neither keep their word. Some love story that.

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