A Vicious Undertow

The film is set in a suburb of the city of Hangzhou in China, which is built as a full scale architectural copy of parts of the French capital of Paris. In contrast to the many other recreations of cities around the world, people actually live in this area. Here, Chinese signs and lettuce fields clash with a reproduction of the Haussmann boulevards and a smaller version of the iconic Eiffel Tower.

[T]he ghost town of Llano del Rio, founded in 1913 by the socialist Job Harriman. The failure of irrigation and water supply finally caused the project, and the town, to be abandoned, nearly a century ago. We observe this desert and the vestiges of this utopian city in the sheeting rain. [...] At the centre of all this, a woman struggles to prevent the collapse. Like Sisyphus pushing his rock, she replaces the bricks and stones falling from the already disintegrated structure. Several times, throughout the film the camera takes us to a dark and gloomy engine room that seems indefinably connected to the ruin. [...]

The films register as an uneasy mapping of female desire, as they chart the slippage between one woman's actual and imagined sexual self. Just sensitively explores the idea that "the received paradigm of a man's journey is that he always returns to the point of departure expecting to find his home and wife unchanged, unaffected. Benedikte's experience, by contrast, is one of pleasurable displacement - she becomes a nomad in her own mind, never returning to her former status quo." Shot on a remote island and on a dilapidated Polish ferry, the trilogy also features an original soundtrack by Theremin composer Dorit Chrysler and American transgender singer/songwriter, Baby Dee.

An older man begins dancing in a public square, oblivious to the laughing gawkers who pass by. He seems to want to engage the attention of a young man sitting on a bench who begins weeping. A group of youngsters mimics and mocks the dancer. He's oblivious to them. The music is a sprightly tune that Fred Astaire might have used as he enticed Ginger Rogers into his arms. And didn't he do a lot of dancing in the streets in his movies? Nobody laughed at him. But, of course, he was only on a pretend street in a Hollywood soundstage. We know this is also a setup. Still, it's embarrassing. They're making public displays of themselves. The man, expressionless, continues to dance. The other man continues to weep. One kid starts taking the performance seriously and joins in the dance as a sort of pas de deux. Both men ignore him. And then it's over. We don't know why it began or ended. Courting ritual or celebration of self, it's unclear. (UbuWeb)

The protagonists of Something to Love are a young man, an older man, a young woman and an underground parking lot, devoid of people and cars, reminiscent of the sets of many thrillers. The film is charged with a film noire atmosphere and the ghosts of all the mysteries shot in parking lots and staircases.

Four Afro-American women drive around the deserted streets of the abandoned city. The palpable tension in the Chrysler reflects the disturbing atmosphere outside. When they come onto the roof of an old theatre, now a parking lot, another woman appears in the picture. Here begins a strange and spellbinding confrontation.

Melodramatic but never campy or over the top and with Hollywood-quality production values, Jesper Just films probe vulnerable, ordinarily well-armored zones of the masculine psyche like grief, same-sex love, Oedipal conflict and spiritual desire.