a few thoughts about susanne bier’s after the wedding, which, i’m learning, is her greatest success yet on the international scene. it’s hard not to like this film. it’s fantastically acted and so intense throughout that you’re on the edge of your seat waiting to see what happens next even though it’s not a thriller but a drama ripe with Human Emotions and, also, a few generous helpings of melodrama. i don’t remember having seen mads mikkelsen before except in casino royale (simon keeps telling me we have seen open hearts but i don’t remember it), and now suddenly i want to see everything he’s done, he does such a fabulous job here, using his singular face to convey a character who’s simultaneously pissed off, haunted, depressed, and very decent. but this is not what i want to talk about.
[SUPER SPOILER]
just like the barbarian invasion, this is a film in which a man can orchestrate his own death thanks to his great wealth and the love and generosity of those around him. i know there is something deeply attractive about this, but it makes me uncomfortable. i am not uncomfortable with the idea of orchestrating one’s death (more power to you if you can do it) and i’m not uncomfortable with the idea of getting people to help you in the performance (though one issue of this film, which is not present in the barbarian invasion, is how far it’s okay to go in manipulating others into participating). what i’m uncomfortable with is great opulence, and a realistic enjoyment of all the things opulent people can do for themselves that non-opulent people can’t. but maybe i’m overstating the realism of this film. maybe it’s more fairy-tale-ish than i make it out to be. if it is, though, what is the tale’s message?
[END SPOILER]
from the little i’ve seen, danish cinema likes to tackles the dilemmas the first world faces when it confronts the third world. jorgen leth’s the five obstructions is an explicit exploration of the pornography of the first world’s representation of the third world (and the man lives in haiti, for goodnessakes!). in after the wedding, jacob is a humanitarian aid worker who’s started a school for orphans or abandoned boys in india. in the first scene, we see him busily handing out plates of food to children, then gravely heading back to the school with a young boy he’s kind of adopted. at first we attribute this gravity to the dire situation of thousands of hungry kids and one man to feed them, then we learn that jacob’s problems have deeper personal roots.
cut to him going to denmark to ask for a donation from a billionaire who’s decided he wants to help someone but has not yet decided who. soon the billionaire’s own life takes over jacob’s, and, also, we learn the reasons for jacob’s hauntedness. the small (in comparison, right?) problems of these two men and their families swallow the whole film and the predicament of the millions of abandoned indian boys facing a life of exploitation and destitution becomes mere exotic color, an interesting and challenging something to do for a danish boy with lots of problems to run away from and a penchant for saving the world. and in fact all the indian scenes are colorful, teemingly busy with that industrious chaos we have learned to recognize as the hallmark of the third world, bathed in golden light, and fundamentally happy. children run around happily while benevolent women in saris take care of them. it’s a simple world out there.
by contrast, denmark is very complicated. people’s lives intersect in mysterious and treacherous ways, interpersonal relationships are fraught with unforeseen obstacles, whole fortunes need to be administered, people couple, marry, and die and it’s all a super big deal. whereas the indian boys are happy with simple quarters and new goal posts, these danish people roll around in fancy cars and live in obscenely wealthy quarters.
well, what gives? if bier had just wanted to juxtapose the personal and the political, she wouldn’t have needed to set the danish part of the film in such opulence. so i gather she’s making a point of this. clearly, compared to kids who (allegedly) survive on a plate of rice and a game of football, anybody in this first world of ours is obscenely wealthy. so maybe she’s trying to underline that. and maybe she’s also trying to expose the ease with which we, the wealthy ones, can move in and out of worlds, one day in bangalore another day in denmark, one day in a shack, the following day in a five star hotel with flat screen tv and modern art as the headboard of our beds. maybe she’s emphasizing the always complicated nature of the benevolence even the best-intentioned westerners bestow on the third world — there today gone tomorrow, always a place to go back to when things get sticky, your life has become my mission, a way for me to feel good about myself, etc. etc.
by portraying the danish world in which the film takes place as such a genteel world, bier jacks up the stakes. jacob’s two worlds don’t even begin to be similar and commensurable. there is a great big gulf between teeming orphan kids and spacious danish estates, and jacob has not even begun to bridge it.
or maybe the point is that whatever bridging is done, it’s always done from a place of privilege, and this place of privilege demands that it not be forgotten, that, in fact, it be emphasized and questioned constantly, lest one begins fancying himself as having gone native, as being one of the others, as having left behind the privilege.
an assumption, i thought, of the five obstructions was that we don’t need to tread on the third world’s ground as if it were hallowed ground. if we did so, we’d be condescending. we’d be implying that the people there don’t know or understand us, that they need to be treated with kid gloves and spoken to loudly and slowly. but they do know us: they know us better than we know them. we don’t need to protect them from our sins. they know our sins. the whole world knows our sins. the sins of the first world are better off aired than hidden, because they have always been in plain sight.
I liked this film as well; though it played as much more of a domestic melodrama than any kind of cogent commentary on West/rest relations (though I do like your take on the film’s politics). There’s something about this film that strikes me as the ultimate male wish-fulfillment fantasy (the main character, now rehabilitated after paying penance, gets an even better “adopted” family in the West while his sweet, brown skinned “adopted son” in India sends Mads back to Denmark with an acquiescent shrug and a smile. You should check out The Celebration if you are interested in more Danish cinema.
oh, jeff, you know i think that most films are male wish-fulfillment fantasies! i resist, though, tempting as it might be, the thought that a woman should make a male wish-fulfillment film too! i was struck by how brothers dealt nicely and responsibly with the woman’s point of view, so i’m trying to see this film as doing more than celebrate masculinity (i know you don’t mean to say that it does), like all movies do, though, some, in the form of berating it, a la no attention is bad attention.
i love the celebration. and, by the way, i saw open hearts again last night on “watch instantly” and liked it a lot. i did remember it just fine, after all.
I thought Mikkelsen was very good in these gangster films (Pusher one, two, three–though he’s not in the last), which I wrote about a while ago. I intend to see this soon (coming from the library), though I didn’t like Brothers as much as you or Chris did.
Aren’t the women in Wedding a bit too reliant on the men in their lives?
they so are, jeff! that’s why i prefer to think of this film in terms of first/rest-world relations than in gender terms.
open hearts is really cool. dunno if you have seen it. it’s about men in distress, but it does a good job with the women, too. the character who becomes paralyzed is amazingly written and conceived.