After the wedding

The second sensational piece of drama I watched was After the Wedding a Danish film by Suzanne Bier. It's one of the best pieces of european cinema I've seen in a while. It's nicely done with the kind of performances which make you forget they're acting and a directing style that manages to be unobtrusive even as she whirls the camera around her characters and into extreme closeups. A lesson in intricate camerawork as a tool rather than an end in itself. See Atonement for an example of someone knowing what they want to direct before they know what the story is.

And the essence of all this fine craftsmenship is that you get to concentrate on the story itself which has the capacity to surprise and intrigue in a way that I did not quite expect of it.

It begins in India with Jacob running an orphanage in India but being summoned back to Denmark in order to persuade a vastly wealthy potential benefactor to save the orphanage from closure. He is a typical developing world project man of a sort I've seen a fair bit of. He's amazing with the kids, passionate, kind and devoted to the project. These attractive qualities make him an attractive man but he has no real time for anyone and although he is immersed in India he is not quite of it. But he has no wish to leave because he does not want to go home. He despises the rich comforts of home and this anger drives him to be good at what he does. It also means he doesn't always make the right choices. A distrust of the wealthy and a belief that there is some purity about not thinking too hard about money has meant that most of his projects have come unstuck. It hurts him to acknowledge it but he needs to engage with the smiling face of capitalism if he is going to really bring about the good he so desperately craves.

And there are not many more smiling faces of capitalism than Jorgen. Fat and jolly and enjoys nothing more than coming home to his enormous mansion in the countryside to read nursery tales to his two supremely scandanavian looking twin boys and then putting his dear mother to bed before joining his wife in the bath fully clothed for a canoodle and a discussion of their daughter's wedding. He is someone who presents a picture of captialism completely at odds with Jacob's simplistic view of what the wealthy are like. He's caring and generous and wants to do give away some of his vast, vast self-made fortune.

This in itself was a promising start as far as I was concerned. It dealt with things I find hugely interesting and aren't discussed enough. Particularly the relationship between charities and their donors. But if it has stuck there it would have possibly lost itself in among the preaching. It doesn't. It moves through a range of revelations which dissect issues of disclosure and trust and the nature of love. In particular it looks at how people try to take care of others by hiding things from them and concocting plans without consulting those involved. It's about personal skills that are so effective in one arena can be so useless in others. And perhaps most of all is about the idea of responsibilities.

I don't want to divulge too much but one aspect that really interested me is the sense that when a westerner settles in a developing country they're always expected back. At some point, despite everything, it will make sense to go back. You are not of the world you live in. Your world, whatever your relationship with it, is across the seas and you can't truly leave it behind. The film is brilliant for the way it depicts India slowly leaving Jacob the longer he stays in Denmark.

This obviously becomes less true when they marry and have children but the point about development work is that you are dealing with people so much less blessed than you. No one does aid work unless they're educated, healthy, well-travelled rich (comparative to the local population and usually far from poor back home either) and free of responsibilities. The people you work and live with are none of those things. And while you can do so much to help them you can't make them your equals in terms of opportunity or knowledge. As a result you are in a strange and, to my mind, hugely interesting personal situation.

My parents spents a weekend in the hills of Bali with a british engineer who'd settled out there. He'd spent most of his life in south east asia working for multinationals and, single and not someone who fitted easily into society back home, when he retired he decided to stay in Bali. But being both restless and generously hearted he decided he wanted to help the most deprived people in Indonesia. He scoured the country and to his amazement found that as good an example as any could be found in the hills of Bali itself. So he went to the village and gave them a proposition. He promised to make their lives better but they had to agree to follow the plan he proscribed for them. Essentially he asked to be an enlightened despot. The elders went away for three days to discuss it and then came back and agreed to it. And he was true to his word. They now have running water into the village. They grow a far more varied and productive range of foods. The youngest kids all go to school and have spread their numeracy around the rest of village. As a result they don't get mercilessly ripped off when they go to sell their stuff at market anymore. It's all good and they just have to do what he says. I have no idea what has happened to it in the two years since they last visited but I am hugely curious about the relationship he has with it. And After the Wedding has done a great job of reminding me of this. Something you almost never see in films.

That's probably the reason it reasonates for me so much but I think anyone who's ever had to deal with family secrets will find something in this film. I reccomend it as much as any film I've watched on DVD this year.