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Home Again: After the Wedding

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Trailer for "After the Wedding"

You can’t help but marvel at what a wonderful guy Jacob is. Even if you recognize the actor playing him, Mads Mikkelsen, as the villainous Le Chiffre in the last James Bond movie, you’re likely to respond to Jacob as the opposite swing of the pendulum: Handsome/ugly in the mode of Viggo Mortensen, he operates an orphanage in Calcutta, where he labors tirelessly to save street children from a life of prostitution and worse, his only ray of sunshine a particular eight-year-old whom he has raised from infancy.

By the same token, you can’t help but smell a rat when you meet Jørgen (Rolf Lassgård). Middle-aged, stout but powerful in the manner of the captain of industry that he is, we first see him driving through rural Copenhagen, as green and unpopulated as Calcutta is hellishly crowded. On his way home to his perfect family, his car stereo blasts “It’s Raining Men.” He’s in charge and he knows it.

Though the Danish-born Jacob has spent the last 20 years in India, he is forced to return to Denmark for a few days when his cash-strapped orphanage is offered a large donation by a philanthropist who insists on meeting Jacob in person. That benefactor, of course, is Jørgen. He barely looks at the video Jacob has made of his operation, claiming to be preoccupied with his daughter’s wedding. Say, he tells Jacob, why don’t you come, and I’ll give you an answer the day after?

In a film titled After the Wedding, it’s a less than Sherlockian deduction to guess that something of import is going to happen at that wedding. And so it does, opening up a wound in Jacob’s past as well as one he never knew existed. Nor is it a surprise to learn that it involves Jørgen, whose claims of coincidence we never take seriously. And as the emotional drama of reunion and recrimination plays out in not wholly unfamiliar ways, we keep wondering, just who is the good guy and who is the bad guy here?

An Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language film of 2006, After the Wedding was directed by Susanne Bier, who has been making films in Denmark since 1991 but attained international prominence when she hooked up with Lars von Triers’ purist Dogme movement. Like most who took that leap, she withdrew after one film, but retained a lot of Dogme’s stylistic tools: handheld digital camera, natural light and an emphasis on emotional truth over artificial manipulation. That’s why her one Dogme film (Open Hearts) wasn’t as good as the one that followed it, Brothers, about the stresses put on an ordinary family when a brother thought dead in Afghanistan returns from a prison camp.

In the long run, After the Wedding is less than the sum of its parts. Like any given Douglas Sirk film, the fact that it is a melodrama which is impeccably acted and intelligently directed doesn’t change the fact that it is still a melodrama. But that’s true of a lot of Dogme films, which on the whole seem to think of plot primarily as an element of structure, less important in and of itself than for what it can support. So if I groaned at the film’s third act revelation, it didn’t diminish my appreciation of the rest of the film, which ends with an unexpectedly sharp note about the unreliability of emotional capital.

Bier’s Hollywood debut, Things We Lost in the Fire, with Halle Berry and Benicio del Toro, opens in September, and American remakes of Brothers and Open Hearts are in the works. Consider this a chance to check her work out in undiluted form.