Open Hearts | Review

Bier demonstrates how paralysis occurs in not one, but two couple’s lives.

If there is one item that the Dogme rules has done – it is bring the camera lenses unromantically closer to its subjects. Susanne Bier magnifies and multiples the lives of fractured souls with a tugging emotional battleground between infidelity and loyalty at the center of the film. Open Hearts (Elsker Dig for Evigt) takes a long look at the injury and recovery process – when one couple’s separation leads to another couple’s disintegration we have another celebratory example of dramatic Danish cinema at its best.

After 9/11, there was a taboo phenomenon that occurred where surviving firemen and policemen were comforting the widows of their fallen colleagues and ended up leaving their own families to take up residence with other families. Accidental destruction compounded by further destruction best describes this storyline which is all about bad timing – it sees how one car accident ultimately pushes a doctor-patient relationship further than anticipated.

Dramatized by strong performances of four familiar faces (Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Sonja Richter, Paprika Steen and Mads Mikkelsen) not unknown to international audiences, this quartet goes to points in the human experience in which not many people would want to go through. Grief, followed by lust thrown into chaos makes for a riveting watch – and how people pick up the pieces and start anew is beyond easy comprehension. Bier keeps some of those emotions beyond the reach of its characters and the characters themselves are presented as people looking for solutions and sometimes not finding them.

Co-written with screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen of Mifune fame, Bier’s compassionate point of view is absorbing and what really rings strongly is this whole issue of voluntarily leaving a person you love – in which this case counts for double. Not particularly heart wrenching – (when the father leaves his family the sequence isn’t overly loaded), but heavy just the same, those crazy Danes have a way of going to places that not many dramas dare not go.

Apart from the grainy Super-8 dream sequences, the rules of Dogme hardly distort or influence a film that is filled full of such vibrancy, honesty and intensity, and this expressionism might be in due part to a female voice being in the controls. Better late than never – (the film was released in 2002), Open Hearts will be looked upon as one of the better films to come from this Danish experiment of aesthetic limitations.

Viewed in original Danish language with English subtitles.

Rating 3.5 stars