After The Wedding (2:59)KXCI's Flicks w/ The Film Snob
Long-held secrets and hidden motives are the tale in the beguiling new film by Danish director Susanne Bierby Chris Dashiell - The Film SnobLong-held secrets and hidden motives are the tale in the beguiling new film by Danish director Susanne Bier, After the Wedding. It starts in Bombay, where a handsome, introspective Danish social worker named Jacob, played by Mads Mikkelson, runs an education program in an orphanage for destitute children. He is completely dedicated to his work, and especially to one little boy, whom he has raised since infancy. One day his manager tells him that a Copenhagen millionaire is considering donating a huge amount of money to the orphanage, but he insists on meeting Jacob personally in Denmark to seal the deal. Reluctantly, Jacob agrees—the program desperately needs funds. On arriving back in his home country, he meets the corpulent businessman Jurgen, played by Rolf Lassgard, and finds him to be friendly but difficult. The rich man won't make a decision until after the weekend, during which his twenty-year old daughter is getting married, and as a matter of courtesy he invites the younger man to the wedding. But Jacob is in for a big surprise when he gets to the wedding next day. Jurgen's wife, the mother of the bride, is Jacob's long-lost girlfriend Helene, played by Sidse Babett Knudsen, whom he hasn't seen for twenty years. And that's not all, not by a long shot. Soon Jacob is faced with the biggest dilemma of his life, and he begins to suspect that events are far too strange to be coincidental. Did Jurgen actually plan all this? And if so, why?
Bier, along with her co-screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen, is one of the filmmakers from the Dogme movement in Danish cinema, which set itself certain formal limits in order to create a truer form of realism. But in the last few years she has stretched well beyond those boundaries, and here her use of music and tight editing creates something akin to melodrama, and I mean that in the best sense of the word because the film's passion and emotional honesty keeps the experience vivid and compelling throughout. The twists and turns of the story are fascinating enough, but the real power here comes from the characters, whose raw emotional reactions to the events propel them into decisions that they never thought they'd have to make.
Mikkelsen is an intense actor who suggests volatility behind a wounded surface. Gradually and surprisingly the story's focus shifts to the enigmatic millionaire Jurgen, and Lassgard is simply outstanding in the role—the viewer's trust and mistrust, like and dislike, shift along with the actor's intriguing, compulsively watchable performance. After the Wedding becomes a kind of cat-and-mouse game between the two men, with the mother and newlywed daughter forming a sort of chorus, but when what's really going on starts to become clear, you end up in a deeper place than you may have expected.
