Efter brylluppet (2006)
Denmark/Sweden
Director: Susanne Bier
Starring: Mads Mikkelsen (Jacob), Rolf Lassgard (Jørgen), Sidse
Babett Knudsen (Helene), Stine Fischer Christensen (Anna)
The impression is good, but a movie like After the Wedding, which I don't know about the director and actors at all, still needs a little extra factor to attract me to watch it. The film saw little publicity in the UK, and would have missed it if it hadn't been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (the winner was The Life of Others).
It turned out that I really liked the movie. The story is about a single male protagonist, Jacob, who works for a charity in India, taking care of orphans. A rich man, Jorgen, has offered to donate large sums of money to charity on the condition that Jacob return to Copenhagen for an interview. After returning from the slums of India to the modern and glamorous city, he just wants to return to India as soon as possible. To his confusion, Jorgen didn't seem interested in his charity work. Jorgen invited him to his daughter Anna's wedding over the weekend. At the wedding, Jacob meets Anna's mother, Helene, and discovers that things are not as simple as he thought.
The first half reminds me of the Danish film Festen - a prodigal son comes back to a party, meets various characters, and the scars of the past are unraveled. But unlike "Family Change", the second half of After the Wedding doesn't get darker and darker, doesn't intend to settle old accounts, but becomes a little soap opera-like drama. "Family Change" is a Dogma95 work, and After the Wedding also has some Dogma95 features, such as a large number of portable camera lenses, direct observation of character expressions and relationship between characters, etc., but the production is relatively fine, plus the plot The turning point of suspense is a good-looking commercial film. The director does not rely on camera shake to create atmosphere, but prefers to keep the camera close to the characters, especially when there are many close-ups of the eyes.
What interests me in particular is the performance of the actors. Several main characters in the play are full of Nordic directness and sincerity - frankness towards others and oneself, frankness towards one's own feelings. The film's almost soap opera plot arrangement, under the interpretation of these actors, seems reasonable and moving. There are several important scenes in the play: the meeting between Anna and Jacob in the hotel, the quarrel and reconciliation between Jacob and Helene, as well as the revealing of the true feelings between Helene and Jorgen, Anna and Jorgen. With irony, the inexplicable ups and downs of feelings in American films, there is a strange fresh feeling. Inject a unique Nordic style into a family drama.
The environment affects the character, perhaps because the living environment is close to nature, the real understanding of the cruelty of nature and the limitations of human power, and the lack of too many dogma constraints, so the real sense of life can be produced.
Director Susanne Bier's predecessor, Brothers (Brødre) in 2004, I only watched the first 10 minutes on TV and had a chance to watch it.
http://taohuawu.net/2007/06/28/after-the-wedding/
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