After the Wedding

By JESSE KORNBLUTH

Sidse Babett Knudsen is the most private of actresses, but she’s very much in our heads now because Netflix has just launched Season 4 of “Borgen.” When it ends, there will be a predictable demand for Season 5. “No way,” Knudsen says. “Birgitte is done.” That’s not a ploy for a bigger salary. This is a woman who, at 53, knows her own mind. All she has allowed her infrequent interviewers to know about her is that she’s unmarried, has an eighteen-year-old son, likes six-month breaks after demanding roles, resists nude scenes, and is very pleased that, in the new “Borgen,” she looks a decade older — at least. “I think my muscles in my face are different when I’m me. When I’m Birgitte, her worry and her responsibility kind of dry her out in some way. What is really great is that the age issue is in there. So I don’t have to hide it.” Season 4 will end. For me, “After the Wedding” is forever.

The first time I saw “After the Wedding,” I didn’t see all of it — like just about everyone else in that theater, for the entire last half hour I was afflicted by a bout of silent sobbing that wouldn’t quit.

I cherish that amazing, unforgettable experience: several hundred people weeping together.

And then — I’m not spoiling the movie here — came a “happy ending” that is perhaps the most satisfying conclusion of any film I saw in that decade.

Satisfying because the characters earned it. There was a huge price for each of them to pay, and they stepped up to it. They earned the right to better. And, because you have lived their struggles with them, you leave the movie with the kind of satisfaction that no studio-financed, movie-by-committee-and-focus-group can give you. [To rent the video stream from Amazon Prime, click here.]

On a low budget, with no-name actors and a less sensitive script, “After the Wedding” would be right at home on Lifetime. Consider the plot. Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen), a Dane in his 30s, works in an orphanage in India. He hasn’t been home in 20 years, and that’s just fine with him. Bad news: The orphanage is running out of money. Good news: Jørgen, a philanthropist, wants to write the large check that will save it. On one condition: He wants to meet the recipient. The woman who runs the orphanage can’t go. Well, Jørgen is Danish, Jacob is Danish. Jacob should go.

Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad free

Reluctantly, Jacob flies to Denmark. Jørgen listens to his pitch for only a few minutes before seeming to lose interest — it’s the weekend of his daughter’s wedding. To which Jacob should come. It’s not, after all, like he has anything else to do.

At the wedding, the first surprise: Helene (Sidse Babett Knudsen), Jørgen’s wife, was once Jacob’s lover — the lover who broke Jacob’s heart, the lover who sent him scurrying off to India, an orphan hiding among orphans.

Other surprises: I’ll spare you. And encourage you to read not a word more about the story — let the twists and turns sear you as they roll out. But I’ll go this far: The rich and poor, the white and the colored, Europeans and Indians — the moral lessons are so easy, aren’t they? Or are they? Is Jacob’s moral purity really an emblem of superiority? Is Jørgen’s privileged life a sign of a rotting soul? You’ll judge — you can’t help it — but when it’s over….

“After the Wedding” was Denmark’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2007 Academy Awards. It lost to the German film, “The Lives of Others.” I would have voted differently. (The Academy did in 2011. Bier’s next film, “In a Better World,” won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Read the Butler rave here.)

There are movies you stream, and you think that you got the amusement you paid for. But sometimes, very rarely, there are movies that stay with you, that you want to press on someone you love and say, “Here. This. A life-changer.” That, in every possible way, is “After the Wedding.”

—

This post was previously published on headbutler.com

***