After the Wedding | Review

Dane family drama makes connections between the past, the present and the future.

Before embarking on her journey to English-language film territory, Susanne Bier takes one more plunge in what constitutes the norm in twisting Dane family dramas. Like with Open Hearts and Brothers (Brødre) beforehand, here personal secrets and accompanying trickle down effects plunge a collective of characters into an unshielded environment. After the Wedding might veer into an unthinkable narrative terrain, but the frame is filled in with tight emotions gripping viewers for the better part of the film’s runtime.

Co-written with Anders Thomas Jensen, Bier places muse actor Mads Mikkelsen in the forefront of a tale that relocates a former Dane from poverty-stricken India to present day Copenhagen. With an upper-class divide, the sun-bleached unbeknownst Jacob is lured by the corporate side of charity and comes across like a tourist among his own people. The narrative offers two significant double climaxes – one person’s best day becomes another’s worst – but the double whammy is then found in how all the money in the world not being able to freeze the hands of a clock still.

In traditional handheld camera fashion and with plenty of physical movement filling up the frame, the cast of characters offer a continual flow of emotions and though there is a pervasion of unimportant extra characters, the central three-way tug of war and then, triangle of healing will offer viewers a thorough manifestation the human condition.

While it may be easy to accuse this family saga oddity of going soft in the final wrap-up stage, Bier is part of a breed of Scandinavians filmmakers who manage to make the fair-complexion citizens of fjord nations appear to be slightly more complex than the norm. The film’s editing, the containment of the surprises in the plot and how the characters dissipate and then nurture one another supports the drama’s mature discussion, this is a must for those who like their tension-filled family dramas to be thick and sometimes, unforgiving.

Festival du Nouveau Cinema

Oct.25th 2006

Rating 3 stars