After the Wedding (2006): B+

Director(s): Susanne Bier. Screenplay: Susanne Bier and Anders Thomas Jensen. Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Rolf Lassgård, Stine Fischer Christensen, Mona Malm, Christian Tafdrup and Niels Anders Thorn. Distributor: IFC Films. Runtime: 119 min. Rating: NR. Year: 2006.

Susanne Bier's After the Wedding was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards this past February. And deservingly so. Yet another richly complex foreign language film, After the Wedding is illuminating, a film whose deep rofoundness reaches an unfathomable cathartic level past any simple contrivance. Jacob (a silently effective Mads Mikkelsen), from Denmark, runs an orphanage in India. This is where Bier's film starts, and she uses a DV—just a simple part of the film's proving aesthetic—to film it. The first shot is of kids lining up waiting for Jacob to feed them. When summoned to Denmark to sustain the orphanage, a kid, quite close to Jacob who lives there says, "You won't come back". Jacob laughs at him, claiming that he hates rich people. Once in Denmark, Jacob meets the obscenely rich Jørgen (Rolf Lassgård), who immediately cuts business and invites him to his daughter's wedding. Jacob goes, but a secret ensues: Jørgen's daughter (Stine Fischer Christensen) (spoiler alert!) is really Jacob's, and Jørgen's wife was once his girlfriend. The film surprisingly avoids soap-drama machinations; for one, Bier's film is concentrated on the human catharsis, and second, more than anything, the actors stop this from occurring. The whole cast—especially Rolf Lassgård, who plays Jørgen—acts magnificently, and without this aspect such a film would be down the drain. Bier's aesthetic is appeased by the film's own poetic milieu— the extreme close-ups, flowers, the house, and taxidermied animals, are just signs of precious life itself. Another one of After the Wedding's stratagems is that someone is dying—it's (spoiler alert!) Jørgen. Many scenes are purely emotionally arresting. Bier knows this throughout; as the film moves along, scenes become stressed and everything is evoked into turmoil. Bier plays with this aspect mostly through Jørgen—whose death waits quite soon—and not even after his death is the film satisfactory: Bier still plays with Jacob. More than anything, After the Wedding is just simply a character study—a complicated, but superb one. The circumstances are complex, but connaissence it does not lack; the depth of each character is immeasurable for just one viewing.Demoralizing to its very core, After the Wedding is richly multifaceted and rough, but posses a harmonious spiritual center. Multiple viewings, will, no doubt, reveal more, but from one viewing, Bier's film is emotionally stable, with a cathartic thrust of gold.

By the end of the film, Jacob is forced to stay in Denmark as part of a deal he signed with Jørgen. This is Bier's last and most unpredictable trick: the kid was right.