“After the Wedding”
IFC Films
Director Susanne Bier
3.5 Paws Out Of 5
Susanne Bier’s “After the Wedding” is just like your favorite daytime drama. It’s got weddings, death, family secrets, tear-drenched confessions, infidelity and a big house in the countryside. Thankfully, unlike your typical soap opera, it lasts only two hours instead of several decades.
Yet despite its conventional structure, this Danish film ““ a 2006 nominee for the foreign-film Oscar ““ still manages its share of risks. It is a work that is not afraid of misleading or confusing its viewers.
The relationships between each of the main characters, and their reactions to each other, remain muddled until late into the plot. Impatient moviegoers might prematurely give up on the whole endeavor.
That would be a pity, because “After the Wedding” has an interesting enough story that it deserves to be followed through.
Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen from “Casino Royale”) is a kind, if a bit stone-faced, guy who runs an orphanage in India. When a businessman named Jørgen (Rolf LassgÃ¥rd) offers $4 million dollars in funds to help the orphanage grow and avoid closure, Jacob travels to Copenhagen to meet with the potential investor face-to-face.
Once there, the young activist is inexplicably invited to the forthcoming wedding of Jørgen’s daughter. As the title of the film unsubtly suggests, things get complicated afterward.
To divulge anything else would do the movie something of an injustice. This is a melodrama, and as such, the entire fun of it all is to follow its unlikely and emotionally heightened windings without foreknowledge of what will happen. Suffice it to say, there are two big secrets, and the last one, revealed near the end, not only explains all the loose ends, but it creates, in Jørgen, a character both larger-than-life and intimately human.
Indeed, the film wraps up rather nicely; too nicely perhaps. The problem with “After the Wedding” is that it has no problem at all.
It’s simply a perfectly self-contained mini-soap opera done well ““ albeit sedately and without sensationalist tendencies ““ with mostly superlative acting. Never does it slow down to a bore and never does it become excessively saccharine. For the most part, it’s fun when it needs to be, and effectively sentimental during the climactic scenes. Ultimately, this is a very good film; memorable even, if only because of LassgÃ¥rd’s tortured millionaire. But there’s nothing remarkable about it. It’s lacking that intangible something that a truly great movie requires.