Dir Lone Scherfig Denmark . 2007. 97 mins
Five years after her admired English-language debut Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself, writer-director Lone Scherfig makes an eagerly awaited return to her native Denmark for Just Like Home, an idiosyncratic ensemble comedy depicting a community in crisis. A slight, slow-burning tale, it lacks the immediate charm and accessibility of her earlier work, notably the award-winning Italian For Beginners (2000), and can only be considered an over ambitious disappointment. Scherfig's reputation will attract interest in the film and allow it to travel but in most international territories this could prove a hard sell.

Just Like Home is set in the kind of smalltown where everybody knows their neighbour and life seems idyllic. David Lynch might have chosen to strip away the surface camaraderie and expose the dark impulses that lurk beneath. Scherfig takes a more gentle, Ealing-style approach as she reveals the individual and collective neuroses that are threatening to destroy the once robust sense of community.

Pompous poet Lindy Steen (Overgaard) gives a talk in the local hall where he remarks on having seen a man running naked through the streets. Suddenly the whole town is talking, obsessively speculating on who the man was. In a country so at ease with public nudity this hardly seems the kind of event to cause such consternation but the identity of the naked runner is more a symptom than a cause of the wide-spread malaise. The fact that the town square has become a building site has also done nothing for local morale. The quest to unmask the man prompts the establishment of a telephone hotline called The Silent Ear which serves as a catalyst for bringing various personal anxieties into the public arena.

Just Like Home has moments of mordant, deadpan humour that produce wry chuckles and sympathetic smiles but it struggles to coalesce into a winning whole. The random stories sometimes feel as disconnected as the community but perhaps that is the point.

The film drifts along rather than building a greater sense of involvement as we learn of local tailor Jesper (Kristian Ibler) whose business is on the brink of bankruptcy, Margrethe (Ann Eleonora Jorgensen) who is hiding from God, the troubles of pharmacist Hans Peter (Kaalund) and of ditzy comptroller Myrtle (Bodil Jorgensen) who fears for her job.

The frequent use of soft-focus photography adds to the oddness of the film and it is only in the closing stages that the spider's web of characters and incidents begin to feel part of a structured, coherent piece. A climax that mixes elements of Spartacus with The Fully Monty provides the kind of crowd-pleasing humour and lightness of touch that are strangely lacking in the earlier stages of the film.

Director
Lone Scherfig

Production Company
Zentropa Productions

International sales
Trust Film Sales

Producer
Sisse Graum Jorgensen

Screenplay
Lone Scherfig
Niels Hausgaard

Cinematography
Anthony Dod Mantle

Production design
Jon Truelsen
Soeren Schwartzberg

Editor
Jorgen Kastrup
Janne Bjerg Sorensen

Music
Kasper Winding

Main cast
Lars Kaalund
Bodil Jorgensen
Ann Eleonora Jorgensen
Peter Gantzler
Peter Hesse Overgaard

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