Tapping the universal power of music in Bliss and Heaven, Jesper Just casts his characters in worlds without words. There, they communicate through song and dance. Challenging the conventions of gender construction from such Hollywood genres as film noir, musicals, and melodrama, Just focuses on emotionally charged encounters between older and younger men. Until recently, women were completely absent from Just’s films, centering mostly on the attractive young Danish actor Johannes Lilleore or one of the older men. This insistence on male-exclusive interrelations reflects Just’s reappraisal of stereotypical ideas about masculinity, which often masquerades as physical virility, sexual aggressiveness, and emotional stoicism in mainstream movies. As viewers get psychologically involved with Just’s characters, they are at first lulled into a false sense of security through the artist’s careful direction. Setting up certain expectations in the audience, Just’s choice of costumes and settings ends up in complete opposition to the type proposed by his characters’ actions, which, in Bliss and Heaven, take place in a vast wheat field, an electrical substation, and a freight container transformed into an ornate theater. There, Lilleore, and by extension the individual viewer, becomes the sole spectator witnessing a middle-aged man’s transformation from truck driver to singer, performing a decidedly unorthodox rendition of Olivia Newton-John’s 1978 hit “Please Don’t Keep Me Waiting.” Dressed in a grimy T-shirt, long blond wig, and flowing chiffon scarf, the older man sings the song in a deep voice, awkwardly performing his cabaret-style act, as the camera moves back and forth between him and the young man watching. As he finishes his performance, the camera pans over to Lilleore who, totally enraptured throughout, breaks into a solitary applause. The resulting incongruence between image and narrative promotes a less stable vision of masculinity, challenging stereotypical gender definitions in a manner very similar to Biggs’s. Capturing the subtleties of sadness, melancholy, and grief, Just is able to weave poetic sensibility around a transgressive core. By inverting cliché and convention Just persuasively involves the viewer in an intensely human reconsideration of masculinity and the mechanics of spectatorship and identification themselves.