Japanese actor and a French goddess arrive on stage. They guide the audience through a hastily compiled and clumsily edited montage of previous winners, before handing out the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and hastily making their exit. If a more meaningless five minutes exists in the world of cinema, I’d like to see it. Most national film awards give out gongs for a best overseas film, but the Oscars? Although initially created to boost American box office takings, the Oscars have regularly rewarded non-American fare in most of the major categories. So why this contradictory piece of tokenism continues to clog up precious space (and the men’s toilets at the Kodak Theatre) year after year remains a mystery. Susanne Bier’s After the Wedding is another example from a shortlist thrown together from the most cursory of ventures into the world of non-English cinema (two-thirds of the world in case you’d forgotten)

The film’s also a particularly frustrating example of these phenomena as its core dramatic material is excellent. Mads Mikkelsen (the bad guy with the fabulous voice from Casino Royale) plays Jacob, a thirty-something Danish aid worker who runs a small, underfunded orphanage in Mumbai. When an offer is tabled from an anonymous Danish businessman, Jacob reluctantly agrees to travel back to his native Denmark to secure the funding. Upon arrival in Denmark, his host insists that he attend his daughter’s wedding, where the true nature of Jacob’s summoning to Denmark begins to play out. Simple, potent dramatic material, crying out for a director with a light, disciplined touch.

It’s a big bloody shame, then, that Bier allows this story little room to breathe, instead cramming it with superfluous technique and references to the work of superior directors. Never a good idea. We’re given splashes of Malick in her jump cuts to random shots of flora and fauna, along with even larger dollops of Bergman in her lingering close-ups of the central character’s faces. Lots and lots of them. The simple camerawork consciously signifies the Spartan philosophy of Trier’s Dogme disciples, without ever explaining why. Surely all or nothing should rule the day? Admittedly I have no tolerance for the Dogme manifesto (film is a unique medium for the exact principles Dogme rejects), but Bier’s half-heartedness about it all is really rather frustrating. The end result is a film cluttered by these feckless embellishments and stripped of much of its considerable dramatic potential.


The cast, luckily, is largely very good, and goes some way to bailing Bier out of trouble. Mads Mikkelsen perfectly captures the contradictions of Jacob, a socially driven, small thinking idealist as well as a self-absorbed and irresponsible figure. Rolf Lassgård also puts in fine work as Jorgen, the gruff and crass corporate success story, whose true motives are far more than they appear. But there’s something contrived in the paradoxes and contradictions in both of these men, something unnaturally symmetrical in the split of their personalities. It grows more and more irritating the closer we get to the overwrought denouement. The female cast, however, is curiously perfunctory. Sidse Babett Knudsen gets little to do outside of cry and point to the door convincingly, and Stine Fischer Christensen’s Anna is a functional if underwhelming middle class princess.

It’s all rather tiresome after an hour. Sadly, Bier subjects us to this intermittently interesting bunch for far too long, and an overwrought denouement runs a good twenty minutes after its natural resolution. Again the overwhelming sensation is of an opportunity lost: promising cinematic material ruined by self-conscious writing and showy, undisciplined direction. In a year that featured Hidden and Ten Canoes, one wonders what the hell this picture was doing on the list of nominations.

After the Wedding is currently in limited release.