Beyond the Multiplex

Denmark's "After the Wedding" is one of the richest and most satisfying foreign films of the year. Plus: a Gallic neo-noir, a samurai classic and more new DVDs.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Independent Film, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

Photo: IFC films

Mads Mikkelsen in "After the Wedding."

March 29, 2007 | Nearly all the attention in this year's foreign-language Oscar race went to the two high-profile entries, the dark fairyland of "Pan's Labyrinth" and the rigorous evocation of East Germany's commie paradise in decay in "The Lives of Others." Both those films are terrific, but for me the category's biggest surprise was found in a movie set more or less right now, absent any child-eating monsters, fascist goons or meticulously awful '80s furniture.

"After the Wedding," from the Danish director Susanne Bier, isn't an especially showy film (although it's luminously photographed, in the post-Bergman Scandinavian tradition), and the story it tells is classic family drama, even if you might not see all its twists coming. A wanderer long absent from his homeland, who has found a surrogate family elsewhere, reluctantly returns to discover that the past still has a surprising hold on him. What feels at first like a quiet, straightforward picture builds into one of the richest and most satisfying of the year so far, in any genre or any language.

Bier is now finishing work on her first American feature, a drama called "Things We Lost in the Fire" that stars Halle Berry and Benicio del Toro, and it's easy to see why producers were eager to snap her up. "After the Wedding" is an audience-friendly film without ever pandering or condescending, and that combination, I'm sorry to say, is getting tough to find in American movies. It works as a compelling evening's entertainment, tightly plotted and full of strongly rendered characters. But it's also emotionally and psychologically dense material, offering a strikingly mature exploration of fate, family and heartbreak, of what we lose and what we gain with the passage of time.

"After the Wedding" is very much a film about first impressions, about how they almost always contain some truth, but don't provide real understanding. Certainly our first impression of Jacob, who is played by Danish film's biggest star, Mads Mikkelsen (he was Le Chiffre, the villainous gambler in "Casino Royale"), is a glowing one. He's a sunburned, 40ish Danish expat who lives and works in an orphanage somewhere in India. Jacob has unofficially adopted an adorable 8-year-old boy named Pramod (Neeral Mulchandani), and even if we get a faint whiff of the possibility that Jacob bailed on someone or something back home, well, so much the better for Pramod and the other orphans, right?

Yeah, more or less. Jacob is a handsome, well-intentioned fellow, and he's the only hero this movie's got. But as we get to know him better our understanding of his motivations deepens, and he becomes less of a saint and more of a shifty, ambiguous character who's making it up as he goes along. Everybody in "After the Wedding" is like that, and let me risk cliché by observing that people outside of movies are like that too. Even Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard), the zillionaire Danish developer who insists that Jacob must travel to Copenhagen and meet him before he supplies the orphanage with some much-needed cash, is like that. Especially him, actually.

At first, Jacob sees Jorgen as nothing more than a human piggy bank (accent on the first syllable) to suck up to shamelessly and drain money from. If they both come from the same small, rich and quiet country, they seem like diametrically opposed human beings: Jacob has given up his life of privilege to help the poor, and Jorgen is a fat, boozy, boorish caricature, the half-Americanized Eurobusinessman with a huge country manse and a chauffeured Mercedes.

Of course it's not quite that simple. From the moment of Jacob's reluctant arrival in Copenhagen (his boss virtually has to shove him on the plane), it's clear that Jorgen has ulterior motives of some kind. He plays a cruel game of cat-and-mouse with the money Jacob's orphanage so desperately needs, dragging the visit out over a long weekend and insisting that Jacob attend his daughter's wedding. (Jacob has promised Pramod he'll be home for the boy's birthday, and you realize right away it's one of those promises adults make to kids that can't be kept.)

As the movie's title probably tells you, that wedding -- which Jacob attends purely out of duty and inertia -- is a central event in the story. There's no way to discuss it without giving away at least the first narrative twist in "After the Wedding," so consider this a spoiler alert. I'll be as abstemious about this as I can, but if you really don't want to know what Jacob learns that weekend about why Jorgen so badly needed to meet him in person, go elsewhere now.

Next page: Gradually, the penny begins to drop ...