My second movie for the SFIFF was Just Like Home. This was a Danish comedy about a small town that has to come to grips with a mysterious man who has been sighted walking around naked at night.
Everyone in the town becomes obsessed with the identity of this man and this once trusting community begins to become suspicious of each other and daily life begins to break down. Work on the new town square comes to a halt when the construction crew goes on strike due to "lack of respect". The mayor is asked to step down because no progress is being made on the naked man issue.
At the same time several other stories are developed; a young girl has left home to take a new job in the town and is worried she's made a bad decision coming to the town. A 40 year old woman escapes from a religious commune to live and hide away in the town and begins to discover normal sexuality that has been repressed. A man who was orphaned as a child is reunited with his estranged sister who has been hospitalized.
All these serious topics are treated with respect yet have more humor than weightiness. The humor of the movie comes in how difficult these people make what should be easy decisions and how these decisions snowball. What keeps this from being exasperating is that the way they treat these situations is not clichéd and they do resolve themselves eventually.
In all I really enjoyed this movie. It had the right amount of humor and was well told.