After the Wedding is a full-blown melodrama with a heavyweight cast. It features several elements of what we now see as director Susanne Bier’s authorial style – the hand-held camera and big close-ups, the strong sense of colour palette (blues and greens here) and a plot that involves a connection to aid work in India. Weddings in many cultures are events which do more to reveal the tensions in families than to celebrate the foundation of a new relationship. And so it is in this case. Mads Mikkelsen is Jacob, a Dane who has lived in India for the past twenty years or so and has established an orphanage project to help street children. He is invited back to Copenhagen to be interviewed by a hotel billionaire interested in making a large-scale charitable commitment. The man in question turns out to be Jørgen – played by Rolf Lassgård, the formidable Swedish actor and one of the few figures in Nordic cinema capable of matching Mikkelsen at full throttle.
Jørgen procrastinates and invites Jacob to his daughter Anna’s wedding. When Jacob arrives at the grand mansion in its extensive grounds he is shocked to see that Jørgen’s wife (and Anna’s mother) is Helene – played by Sidse Babett Knudsen, currently the Danish Prime Minister in Borgen. We can all probably guess what the revelation that follows will be and the fourth major player in the drama becomes Anna herself, well played by Stine Fischer Christensen. But this revelation is not actually the main narrative twist – the real question is why Jorgen has seemingly engineered a situation which can only cause trouble. I won’t reveal the answer but only say that in developing the narrative, Bier sets up some very interesting debates about entrepreneurship and global capitalism, foreign aid and charitable giving etc. alongside personal happiness and responsibilities and family commitments. This is an interesting mix which we don’t often find in a melodrama. We don’t, of course, get a neat answer and nor should we, but the discussion is valuable.
The film looks terrific and I found it to be an intriguing mix of the vitality of the Dogme-style camerawork (hand-held and minimally lit) and strong acting performances with the sumptuous melodrama mise en scène of the mansion interiors – most evident in Jørgen’s room full of the heads of animals he has shot (possibly a reference to Vincente Minelli’s Home From the Hill?). The Indian locations at the beginning and end of the film also add colour – and music. In that sense the film is certainly a melodrama, as it is with the various plot coincidences. The four actors are all capable of expressive performances with Lassgård particularly good in a boorish drunk scene and Mikkelsen very good at being sullen and aggrieved.
But as well as a satisfying melodrama, After the Wedding asks us to consider what we achieve in our lives. Is looking after your loved ones as important as helping thousands out of poverty? Does helping thousands mean atonement for actions that hurt a few? If you are ‘good’ but don’t help anyone, even those you love, as much as you would like to, does that make you a failure? From this you can move on to more philosophical questions. Is foreign aid ever a good idea? Is it more to assuage the guilt of the giver than to help those who ‘receive’ it?
After the Wedding was nominated for Best Foreign Language Oscar. Susanne Bier didn’t win but she only had to wait a few years until Haeven (2011)
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The Case for Global Film 