After the Wedding
(Efter brylluppet)

Director Susanne Bier
Writer Anders Thomas Jensen
Denmark 2006
120 minutes

Our notes

After the Wedding is a poignant, complex drama about the fragility of life and the need to avoid our assumptions determining our judgements. Susanne Bier has directed a series of her award winning films in her native Denmark, including "Open Hearts" which was widely praised as the best Danish film of 2002. Susanne was part of the Dogme 95 movement in Danish cinema led by Lars Von Trier, which successfully questioned many of the basic assumptions made of mainstream filmmaking in an attempt to root film back in the reality of people's real, everyday experience.

The influence of the Dogme style can still be seen in the hand-held camerawork, especially in the unusual, slightly unsettling framing of close up shots of hands and faces. It is also there in the loose script that feels spontaneously "natural" and improvised. This is just as well as the criticism that could be made of the film is that its plot stretches the credulity of the audience a little too far. That we remain interested, and willingly continue to suspend our disbelief, is down to the sensitivity of the director, whose camera work probes the characters and their motivations without being overbearing and the great skill of the ensemble acting.

This focuses around our main character, Jacob, played by Mads Mikklesen, who you may remember as the villain in the last Bond film, Casino Royale. Here he plays a soulful hero, perhaps more attuned to the suffering that can be seen on the surface than the deep tides and ebbs of feeling in his own relationships. He helps to run a struggling orphanage in one of India's poorest regions. Reluctant to return to Denmark, but desperate to save the orphanage from closure and its only link to the West, he returns to meet Jorgen, a wealthy businessman and potential benefactor.  Jorgen offers Jacob a seemingly innocent invitation to attend his daughter's wedding.

Domineering and apparently hopelessly manipulative, Jorgen, in a tremendous performance from Rolf Lassgard, we gradually realise is both exactly the kind of capitalist that Jacob expects him to be but a lot more besides. Jacob, naturally, objects to sharing the same country, never mind the same country house with Jorgen. But as "champagne is poured and secrets are spilled", as the film's poster's tag line put it, Jacob has to recognise the skein of relationships that bind us to people we don't "naturally" take to. Anyone born into a family will recognise the dilemma.

After the Wedding was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2006 but lost out to another film in this year's season, "The Lives of Others". The writer Anders Thomas Jensen was also involved in the writing of the Bafta award winning British film, "Red Road".

Jacob - Mads Mikkelsen
Jorgen - Rolf Lassgard
Anna - Stine Fischer Christensen
Helene - Sidse Babett Knudsen

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