After the Wedding arrives today for its Canadian theatrical run with many accolades, including major award nominations.
Among others, this enthralling Danish film contended for an Oscar as best foreign language film (losing out to Germany's The Lives of Others). It also earned two noms for European Film Awards, for Susanne Bier as best director and for Mads Mikkelsen as best actor, plus four noms for Bodils (the Danish film awards), winning one.
Mikkelsen also returns with plenty of attention. After filming with Bier, he went Hollywood as the stylish Le Chiffre in the new 007 film, Casino Royale. Mikkelsen confronted Daniel Craig with a villainous glee that put him on James Bond's all-time foe list.
There is a reason for all the fuss about the Danish film. After the Wedding is a stunningly effective
melodrama. And Mikkelsen re-establishes himself as one of Europe's most dynamic and yet restrained actors, making him sublimely effective in a film as challenging as Bier's new work.
Mikkelsen, who is gaunt, sad and haunted in his eyes, plays a Danish expatriate who helps run an orphanage in India. The facility is near bankruptcy. When a rich Dane offers a sizable donation -- but only if Mikkelsen returns to Copenhagen to negotiate the terms -- our reluctant hero complies. He does not want to do so for a positive reason -- his promise to attend a boy's birthday party at the orphanage -- and for unknown negative reasons -- Copenhagen seems to represent failure and regret.
Back in Denmark, Mikkelsen's bombastic benefactor (Rolf Lassgard) insists that his moody guest attend a wedding. It involves Lassgard's eldest child, Anna (Stine Fischer Christensen). It is quickly evident that Mikkelsen already knows the bride-to-be's mother (Sidse Babett Knudsen).
After the wedding ceremony -- hence the film title -- events will overtake all the major players, with their lives thrown into emotional chaos. Meanwhile, Bier cuts back to the beguiling Indian orphan (Neeral Mulchandani) to remind Mikkelsen, and us, of the birthday obligation.
If not played to perfection -- and all the performances are note-perfect, like a symphony of gestures, mood poems and spartan dialogue -- the story might have quickly spun into nonsense. Indeed, some critics think it did. After the Wedding generated a few virulent attacks along with high praise.
It is, perhaps, a question of taste. For mine, director and co-writer Bier and her astonishing ensemble elevate the scenario from coincidence and contrived drama into human art.
These characters are not just plausible, they seem so direct and pained and penetrating and real that we almost feel ashamed to peer in on the intimate details of their lives.
If what Bier and veteran co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen created is melodrama, then so is the stuff of life.
After the Wedding is also beautifully rendered on screen, through Morten Soborg's elegant yet never flashy cinematography, which relies on close-ups to thrust us into the characters' innermost thoughts, and through Johan Soderqvist's atmospheric music. These technicians bring a sense of intimacy to the story and the performances that wraps us -- the viewers -- in an embrace and makes even the most subtle moments significant.
As the Danes have known throughout its Dogme era, that is cinema.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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