May. 22, 2007 - Issue #605: Lacuna Coil
After the Wedding, give me a Bier!
After the Wedding is one of those rare films where you can see the director thinking, where there are no loose ends and none of the scenes could be considered throw-away. From its opening frames right to its ending, Susanne Bier’s (Open Hearts) film has everything in its place.
On paper, the storyline could seem a bit contrived. Danish expat Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen) runs an orphanage in southern India that is chronically low on funds. He is compelled to return to Denmark when Jørgen (Rolf Lassgård), a wealthy businessman there, offers the project $4-million dollars—on the condition that Jacob close the deal in Copenhagen. While Jacob’s there, however, Jørgen plays the puppetmaster, dangling an old family secret that changes the course of Jacob’s life forever.
This is where my job gets difficult—I don’t want to give away too much. It isn’t After the Wedding is a thriller or even that some of the plot isn’t easily conjectured, but there is a subtle suspenseful thread that runs through it that weaves the film its many layers. It didn’t take long for me to stop waiting for the La Chiffre blood tear to creep out of Mikkelsen, who played the Casino Royale villain. Between Bier’s exceptional camera-eye and Mikkelsen’s understated and compelling performance, there was so much more depth to drink in. Mixing together an ounce of stoicism, a cup of pathos and a dash of deep-seated anger, Jacob comes across as a man both shyly conflicted and openly confident.
The way Jacob sputters and stutters about the work of the orphanage to the businessman who holds the power of its survival or the way his body assumes more space when his back is forced up against a wall is really quite mesmerizing. Mikkelsen completely inhabits his character, giving him not just depth but total personhood—if that makes sense.
Likewise, Lassgård rejects the temptation to make Jørgen the stereotype of the overbearing, powerful businessman. He is certainly larger than life, ably filling his massive mansion with personality, but his mortal humanity also seethes just under the surface until it bubbles over near the film’s end. Again, I don’t want to give too much away, here, but I will say that, with the scene in question, I have never seen anything like it—and you’ll know it if you see it.
The biggest joy of all, though, is watching Bier at work. Using closeups of eyes, or a single eye, of fingers on skin or a throat, she conveys a sense of letting us into her characters. And the quick cuts to and from memories give us glimpses of life beyond she what she tells us.
The way each scene is set up is another clue that we are seeing both everything Bier wants us to see and only what she wants us to see. When Jørgen gets drunk, for example, he gets belligerent, trying to assert his virility, he is in his dead animal room. The mounted heads of deer surround him, watch him, and seemingly and silently mock him. Again Bier uses closeups, volleying between a deer’s glass eye, Jørgen’s wife’s (Helene, played beautifully by Sidse Babett Knudsen) mouth and over to his eye.
What Bier ends up with is melodrama without the theatrics, emotional depth without the sentimentality and familiarity without the cliché. And its a joy to watch her work. V
Opens Fri, May 25
After the Wedding
Directed by Susanne Bier
Written by Bier, Anders Thomas Jensen
Starring Mads Mikkelsen, Rolf Lassgård, Sidse Babett Knudsen
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