After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet)
The Danish director Susanne Bier isn’t afraid of melodrama, and that’s a rare quality in a pop landscape of creeping irony and junk. Her recent movies — 2002’s ‘‘Open Hearts’’ and 2005’s ‘‘Brothers,’’ both written with Anders Thomas Jensen — are full-blooded, impeccably filmed tempests in which above-average-looking Danes hammer out issues of loyalty and love, guilt and resentment.
In ‘‘After the Wedding,’’ again with Jensen, she pushes the envelope further, toward operatic passion and the visual symbolism of Ingmar Bergman. The new movie goes over the top, but more often than not a viewer goes with it, yanked along by the integrity and intensity of the emotions splattering the walls. Bier reminds us why we come to melodrama in the first place: To see our own dilemmas played out on an epic domestic scale.
There’s not much I can tell you about the storyline without giving necessary secrets away. ‘‘After the Wedding’’ begins in India, where a glowering Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen, the blood-weeping villain of ‘‘Casino Royale’’ and star of seemingly every new Danish film) has buried his bad-boy past in two decades of helping street children get food, medicine, and an education. Jacob is dedicated to the cause and bitterly scornful of the West, so he returns to Copenhagen under protest, only because a businessman benefactor wants to meet him.
The businessman is Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard): hulking, sly, confident. He invites Jacob to the wedding of his daughter, Anna (Stine Fischer Christensen), and there the skeletons begin tumbling out of the closet, one after the other. ‘‘Too much fits together too well,’’ comments Jorgen’s wife, Helene (Sidse Babett Knudsen), at one point, and that’s the movie’s flaw and its source of pleasure. Among other things, ‘‘After the Wedding’’ addresses the ways in which we unknowingly will the coincidences in our lives into existence.
There are four contestants in this boxing match: Jacob, Jorgen, Helene, and Anna. Each actor rises to the dramatic challenge, but Lassgard may have the hardest job of the four. Jorgen is a master manipulator, a self-centered pig, a loving father, and a deus ex machina; when the character cracks at the seams toward the end, the movie comes close to collapsing with him. It’s a mark of Bier’s skill (and trust, in both her players and her audience) that it doesn’t.
There are times nonetheless when ‘‘After the Wedding’’ tests a viewer’s patience. Bier’s visual style here is feverish and seemingly unmoored, and she lays on a heavy load of symbolic shots of animals, alive and stuffed. A shot of scheming Jorgen is followed by an image of a dead fox, and when Anna learns a devastating truth about her parents, we cut to a ladybug literally flying away.
There are also twice as many close-ups of the characters’ eyes as there probably need to be, but this is a movie about people looking at each other until they’re at last able to see. Mikkelsen and Christensen give almost their entire performances with their eyes and their characters end up the most well-rounded and sympathetic.
‘‘Do I have to live on the other side of the world to get your help?’’ howls Jorgen in a key scene, and Jacob’s unspoken answer is Bier’s real concern. ‘‘After the Wedding’’ is about emotional homecoming and the bearing witness to passion that makes it possible. Life’s a mess, it says, but you can’t sweep up the dirt until you’ve taken a good, hard look at it.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
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