After the Wedding

Efter Brylluppet
Susanne Bier, 2006, 119 minutes

After the Wedding (or Efter Brylluppet) starts and ends in India, the place Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen) thinks of as home. Short on money for his orphanage, Jacob travels to his native Denmark to meet with a rich businessman named Jørgen (Rolf Lassgård). The film presents a vivid contrast between Jacob's life running an Indian orphanage and Jørgen's life running a European business. As the two discuss whether Jacob's orphanage will receive a grant, Jørgen invites Jacob to Jørgen's daughter's wedding.

At the wedding, the first of many revelations take place, that Jørgen is not the biological father of his daughter Anna (Stine Fischer Christensen). After the wedding, the revelations keep piling up to create an original story about modern, transcontinental, multi-cultural family life. Without giving away the story, let's just say that Jacob ends up more involved with Jørgen's family than he could have imagined, and in ways that he has trouble understanding.

As Bier reveals new relationships between the film's characters, a funny thing happens. For instance, when Jacob enters the chapel late for Anna's wedding, Jørgen's wife Helene (Sidse Babett Knudsen) catches Jacob's eye. Outside the chapel, we see Jacob and Helene interacting in a way that makes us realize they must have met with some romantic interest before. Jørgen spots them apparently flirting, and then formally introduces his wife to Jacob. Jørgen acts like the jealous husband. Later, though, after we learn more about these three characters, this scene outside the chapel reads completely differently. Jacob and Helene are not flirting, and Jørgen is not jealous.

This happens over and again. Bier will present a scene in a way that we think we understand the meaning and the characters' motivations, but then she yanks out the rug by telling us a little more about the characters, and she forces us to re-evaluate that scene. In a broader multicultural sense, Bier makes us aware that we bring our own blinders to every scene, that we can't really understand the characters in our lives until we get to know them.

After the Wedding has a smart cinematic language. The camera whirls around the characters in a way that lets us see they are three-dimensional, fully faceted. The motion tells us that we can't understand these characters without seeing the whole being. Here and there, Bier also throws in close-ups of both the eyes of the film's characters and eyes of wild animals. At first disconcerting, Bier suggests many things with her ocular counterpoint. The film's characters have some animal in them; the characters are hunting and hunted as are the stuffed animals; the characters ultimately live in natural world of breeds and packs.

Jacob returns to India, to his multicultural family of orphans, a transformed man. He meets with Pramod (Neeral Mulchandani), whom Jacob has raised like a son, to ask Pramod to move to Denmark. When Pramod decides to stay in India rather than move to Denmark, Jacob sees that cultural comfort can trump the comfort extended family. We are all wolves and we know our packs.