Review - Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

When is a biopic not a biopic? When it’s an ‘imaginary portrait’ of course. Plenty of films have been accused of manipulating the facts and fictionalising the stories of true-life characters in the past, but Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus gets its retaliation in first with the unusual step of including a disclaimer in the title. Just in case we don’t get the idea, another disclaimer precedes the opening credits which tells us that this film is meant as “a tribute to Diane that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus’s inner experience on her extraordinary path”. In other words, don’t believe anything you see here because we’ve made most of it up.

In a way, we should be thankful for a film like Fur, a film which at least deviates from the standard biopic structure which has resurfaced with such depressing frequency in recent years. Steven Shainberg gave the romantic comedy genre a welcome boost in 2002 with the S+M shenanigans of Secretary, but his attempt to impose a similarly skewed perspective onto Diane Arbus’s story quickly unravels. The opening disclaimer mentioned above refers to Arbus as one of the most important artists of the 20th Century, someone whose work changed American photography forever, but the film gives us no evidence of this, instead deciding to offer us a tediously irrelevant story about a bored housewife and her hairy neighbour.
Fur opens with Diane Arbus (a miscast but very watchable Nicole Kidman) taking a bus ride out to a secluded nudist colony, hoping to photograph some of the residents. A nude couple run Arbus through the colony’s rules, including their request that photographers should be as naked as everyone else before they take pictures. Arbus agrees but asks for a little time alone before disrobing, and as the couple get up to leave the woman notices Arbus’s locket, which contains a tuft of hair in a red ribbon. “It belonged to a friend” she says, and the film then slips into a feature-length flashback which begins three months previously.

At this point in time Diane isn’t the photographer in the family, her husband Allen (Ty Burrell) is, shooting cheesy spreads for women’s magazines and advertisements for the furrier business run by her parents (Harris Yulin and Jane Alexander). Diane helps out with her husband’s preparations, occasionally advising him on his compositions, but it’s very clear from her demeanour that she’s a knotted ball of frustration. During the party being thrown at her place early in the film Diane slinks about in the shadows, observing the well-to-do friends of her parents, and Shainberg focuses in on the guests’ mouths as they slurp and scoff their food, the heightened sound effects turning them into grotesque figures - freaks, you might say. Later Diane seems to be on the edge of a breakdown when she finds herself at the centre of attention, and she flees the scene halfway through her explanation of her role in Allan’s work. She runs to the balcony and inexplicably opens her dress to bare her underwear to the world.
Fur portrays this pre-fame Diane Arbus as a woman whose inner passions are raging behind the prim façade she must present to the world in this stifling environment. Kidman can handle these buttoned-down emotions as well as anyone, and she brings her usual intelligence and dedication to the part, giving a sensitive, nuanced, appealing performance. Kidman’s desire to continually lend her talents to risky roles in films from inexperienced directors is admirable, but on too many occasions her skills haven’t been matched by the material. This was the case in 2004 when she gave one of the best screen performances of recent years in the otherwise muddled Birth, a similar fate befell her marvellous display in British misfire Birthday Girl, and the same unfortunate scenario transpires here. Kidman tries to make Arbus come to life but the film gives her no support.

At last, help arrives for Kidman in the shape of her new neighbour. She has already caught a glimpse of this mysterious figure wearing a bizarre patchwork balaclava on the night he moved in, and when Diane starts finding large lumps of hair in her pipes she is intrigued. The man upstairs is Chewbacca - sorry, I mean Lionel - and he is played by Robert Downey Jr, but you wouldn’t recognise the actor at first sight as he is covered head to toe in thick brown hair. Lionel suffers from a condition known as Hypertrichosis which causes excessive hair growth over his whole body. Lionel fascinates Diane, encouraging her to finally pull out the camera Allan gave her years ago and take some photographs, but Lionel refuses to have his portrait taken until they have fully investigated each other. Instead, he takes Diane to meet his friends - dwarves, giants and an armless woman who lights cigarettes with her feet - and she blossoms in his company, becoming increasingly comfortable in this hidden society, much to the horror of her family.

The point Shainberg seems to be making is that Arbus needed to understand society’s cast-offs and outsiders, to perhaps feel some sense of kinship with them, before she began to photograph them, but if that is the thesis of Fur (it’s hard to say for sure) then the filmmakers never really manage to sell it. Did Arbus’s pictures of various deformed and eccentric figures really carry the sense of warmth and sympathy such an understanding would supposedly lend them? Or were they more distant and anthropological, observing the subjects with a cold detachment - fascinated but unmoved. To be honest, if you have questions about Arbus’s true thoughts towards her subjects or the motivations behind her unusual approach, then this is not the movie to answer them. Diane barely uses her camera during the course of the picture and none of her genuine photographs are ever shown; so when the film refuses to treat the central figure with any sort of seriousness or any clear intent, what’s left?

There are things to like about Fur, and for the film’s first hour I was sticking with it, hoping - almost praying - that its loopy narrative was leading us somewhere of consequence. Shainberg maintains a fairytale atmosphere to his storytelling, referencing the likes of Alice in Wonderland and La Belle et la bête, but he also seems to be aiming for a mood of subdued eroticism, which is a pretty difficult pitch to hit successfully. This blend of different tones just seems awkward and flat, and the resolutely understated approach employed by Shainberg takes its toll in the second half with the picture looking increasingly lethargic. He does do good work with his actors, though. The very fact that Robert Downey Jr can show us any sort of emotions from inside that giant furball is something of an achievement, but he brings am odd sense of dignity to Lionel, expressing the pain of a lifetime of exclusion through the sadness in his eyes and the tremor in his voice. The best performance in the film comes from Ty Burrell though, who is excellent as Diane’s baffled husband, watching helplessly as his wife turns into a different person before his eyes.

But their performances amount to nothing in this frustrating film, and Fur loses its way completely in the final third. The long sequence in which Diane shaves Lionel is intended to be erotic and touching, but it simply comes off looking weird and creepy instead, and some murmurs of discontent started making themselves heard at the screening I attended. Those murmurs turned to sniggers when the now-hairless Downey appeared and hopped into bed with Diane, and it was clear that the film had finally slipped into the yawning pit of ridiculousness which it had been precariously hovering over for the past two hours.

Is Fur really a fitting tribute to a woman who, as the filmmakers say, changed 20th Century photography? The film at once asks us to take it as an imaginary piece of work, and yet claims to “express what might have been Arbus’s inner experience”, but it can’t achieve either of these aims. Fur fails to convince as a drama, it offers no insight into its subject’s personality or her work, and all it has in its favour is a collection of actors who fight valiantly against the rising waves of inanity. Actually, Fur did tell me one thing about Arbus which I didn’t know before, the correct pronunciation of her first name was actually Dee-ann; but whether it was worth sitting through the picture just for that earth-shattering revelation is another matter entirely.

Review - 300

Hollywood has mangled, altered and butchered as many works of literature as it has adapted over the years, but the work of graphic novelist Frank Miller appears to be sacrosanct amongst filmmakers. The last screen version of a Miller comic book was Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City; a cold-blooded, nihilistic movie which played more like a frame-by-frame reconstruction of the illustrations which inspired it than anything resembling a fresh film experience. Of course, fidelity to the source material is admirable, but the slavish attention paid to Sin City’s look appeared to be the film’s raison d'être, and no attempt was made to adapt Miller’s comic for a completely different medium. It resulted in a flat, episodic and hollow experience.

A similar fate befalls 300, an aesthetically striking film which tells the story of the 300 Spartans who bravely fought to the death in order to defend their country from a million-strong Persian army. I can’t vouch for 300’s credentials as a comic book, but as a film it’s a dispiriting, alienating experience. Two hours of purposeless visual trickery depicting people we don’t care about, in a world we don’t recognise, engaging in a series of barbaric acts. Fans of Miller’s work will undoubtedly be delighted to see his stories, once again, finding a their way to the multiplex intact - and I suppose, in a way, that can be seen as some sort of achievement - but that’s about the only thing 300 achieves.

300 is predominately the story of Leonidas (Gerard Butler), one of the few members of the titular group who is lucky enough to have some sort of character. The film opens by detailing his backstory; how he was trained to be a great warrior almost as soon as he could walk, how he was sent alone into the wilderness to prove his worth aged 7, and how he eventually grew to become the King of Sparta. It’s 480 BC and trouble is on the horizon. As Leonidas instils the same virtues of honour and bravery into his own son, under the loving eye of his wife Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey), a messenger arrives with a handful of crowned skulls and a warning for the King. He tells Leonidas that Sparta will be destroyed unless it submits to the rule of King Xerxes, a man whose vast army has already conquered most of the surrounding lands, but Leonidas politely declines, pulling his sword on the messenger and his comrades. “This is madness” the now-worried stranger pleads; “THIS. IS. SPARTAAARGHH!” Leonidas replies before kicking him down a handily-placed well.

Thus, the stage is set. Leonidas selects 300 of his best men and heads north to intercept the marauding hordes, defying the orders of the priests and the council in the process. What follows is a lot of macho posturing, plenty of violence, and nary a worthwhile human emotion in sight.

300 has been directed by Zack Snyder, who brought a snappy inventiveness to his Dawn of the Dead remake, but given the curious translation of this story from page to screen, one wonders how exactly to analyse his role in the proceedings. He uses the illustrations of Miller’s comic as a guide and recreates the action in a literal fashion, but surely a director should do more than simply point and shoot? There doesn’t seem to be any interpretation of the material here, just a reproduction, and Snyder’s staunch, straightforward rendering of the narrative lacks any sort of personality or shape. 300’s pacing resembles a slow march, with one battle against numerous foes being followed by another battle against an even greater number, and the film simply repeats this pattern ad nauseum. Snyder throws in a bit of half-developed political intrigue to try and beef up the plot, but the lack of sophistication in the writing and the strictly mediocre performances from Headey and Dominic West (as a corrupt senator) render this aspect of the screenplay redundant.

With 300’s script failing to capture my attention it was left to the film’s other departments to try and impress. Gerard Butler certainly does his bit to grab the viewers with a loud, hammy, and oddly endearing piece of acting which gives the film a commanding central figure to work around. Butler’s performance shouldn’t work - he makes little attempt to hide his Scottish accent and he's constantly either shouting or grimacing - but he brings a certain gravitas to the film and he at least manages to inject a little wit into his performance. I liked the sight of Leonidas chomping on an apple while standing on a pile of bodies, and his statement that “there’s no reason we can’t be civil” as a vanquished foe is impaled yards away. But Leonidas is the only character who is endowed with even a smidgen of depth, and there’s no sense of empathy with any of the figures involved in this bloodbath. The battle sequences have no impact as a result; various anonymous figures are stabbed and chopped up and it’s all utterly meaningless, with Snyder’s attempts to wring a sense of pathos out of the later stages falling well wide of the mark.

Snyder has made every effort to ensure the carnage looks nice, though. Utilising the same green screen technology that Rodriguez employed for Sin City, 300 creates a whole world inside a studio, and the results are often impressive. The film is bathed in a golden light and some sequences work on a vast scale, with the sight of the Persians’ countless arrows blocking out the daylight being a particularly memorable image. But the visual splendour of 300 is somewhat undermined by the ugliness of its perspective. An undercurrent of racism, homophobia and fascism seeps through every frame of the picture (although the film does manage the rare feat of being comically homoerotic and homophobic at the same time). The enemy facing Leonidas and his army are, without fail, black, arab, deformed or gay; while the Spartan forces are, without fail, perfect specimens of masculinity whose toned torsos are shot with a reverence which would make Leni Riefenstahl blush. The Spartans preach complete devotion to the state and discard any infants born with imperfections, and the film plays up the grotesquery of the Persians at every opportunity, depicting Xerxes himself as a pierced, mincing queen.

Is there any sort of intention on the part of the filmmakers here, or are they simply respecting their source material? If the latter is the case, then what was Miller’s intention with this exaggerated juxtaposition of values? Of course, one could argue that the film is so divorced from reality there’s hardly any point in looking closely at such themes, but 300’s constant extolling of such virtues is a strange aspect of the picture which makes a very dull film even more unpleasant to watch.

300 is a film which arguably achieves what it set out to achieve - it faithfully adapts the work of Frank Miller for the big screen - but that’s a meagre accomplishment when it fails to offer anything beyond that level, and the film’s lack of respect for the basic pleasures of cinema is thoroughly depressing. What price a well-crafted narrative, evocative writing, rich characterisation, or emotional weight? 300 can’t find room for any of these notions in its endless orgy of violence. When Snyder shoots a sex scene between Leonidas and Gorgo he films it in the same mechanical, over-stylised method with which he shoots everything else - it’s lovemaking without any feeling - and one quickly gets the idea that it has been inserted purely to titillate the target audience before Snyder hurries along to the next testosterone-fuelled impalement, beheading or dismemberment. There’s so much blood spilled in 300, but it’s a movie without a soul.

Review - Factory Girl

Edie Sedgwick arrive in New York in the mid-1960’s with a head full of dreams and her rich family’s money behind her. For a few years this spiky young gamine was America’s “it” girl, captivating high society with her stunning looks and distinctive style. She soon became Andy Warhol’s muse and confidant, hanging out with his factory crowd and appearing in a number of his films as their fame grew in tandem; and she then romanced Bob Dylan, who wrote songs in her honour. Edie’s star burned brightly, but briefly; she had everything, and then nothing. In 1971 Edie Sedgwick died from a drug overdose at the age of 28.

This is undeniably a very sad tale, but is it a movie? We’ve surely seen stories like this told a million times before in various incarnations, and Factory Girl is just more of the same; another riches-to-rags story in we watch this beautiful woman slip further into degradation until she finally brings an end to her painful life. The only point of interest this movie may have is that it purports to tell the story of a famous socialite and, by extension, that it might reveal something about two of the era’s most iconic figures, Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan. But Factory Girl is a garbled mess which is too silly and unsure of itself to reveal anything of significance.
Factory Girl’s director George Hickenlooper has a background in documentaries - in fact, he was a co-director on the wonderful Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse - but he shows no documentary-style rigour in his handling of this story, preferring instead to present Edie Sedgwick in the most hackneyed way possible. He opts for a standard biopic structure, with Edie (Sienna Miller) recounting her experiences to a Cottage Hospital counsellor, reminiscences which provide Factory Girl with its narration. After a brief flashback to a Cambridge art college Edie goes to stay with her friend Chuck Wein (a miscast and clueless Jimmy Fallon) in New York, and her fate is sealed when she catches the eye of Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce) at a typically swinging party. How does Hickenlooper depict this fateful meeting? By having Warhol spot Sedgwick dancing in slow motion across the room. When she pulls out a cigarette, six men thrust lighters in her direction. The clichés just keep on coming.

While Hickenlooper bores us rigid with one lazy montage after another, the two actors at the heart of Factory Girl work hard to make us care about the story being told. For Miller, this is the perfect role at the perfect time; she too has achieved celebrity status by virtue of her good looks, fashion sense and association with others, and she seems perfectly comfortable in Edie Sedgwick’s skin. Miller attacks the role with gusto, capturing Edie’s voice and mannerisms, and under certain conditions she bears a striking resemblance to the film’s subject. Pearce looks the part too, with his pale blotchy skin and shock of white hair, and he plays Warhol as a cunning, arch manipulator; almost vampiric in the way he sucks Sedgwick dry and then brutally severs their friendship as soon as he feels he has no further use for her.

Both actors score highly for their impersonations, but they lack the depth and direction required to blossom into real living, breathing performances. They’re great recreations, but they have no inner voice. Miller pours plenty of emotion into the part as the naïve Sedgwick is used and abused by all around her, but it becomes increasingly hard to care about her plight because Hickenlooper and his team of screenwriters have failed to flesh out the character with the rote nature of their scripting. Pearce’s Warhol is initially intriguing, but the film never really tries to explores the artist’s character beyond the pathetically trite pop-psychology theories which litter the picture.

And then there’s Bob Dylan - or rather, there isn’t. Hayden Christensen first appears on screen walking offstage with a guitar in his hands and a harmonica around his neck, but according to Factory Girl’s credits this character is known only as “The Musician”, although he is referred to in the film as Billy Quinn. The motive behind this strange ersatz character was the threat of legal action from Dylan after he took a dislike to the film’s portrayal of his relationship with Edie, but the picture doesn’t actually reflect too badly on the singer. According to Factory Girl Dylan recognised Warhol’s manipulation of Sedgwick and tried to make her see the light, and when she later fell on hard times - long after their relationship had ended - he can be seen sending one of his aides to see if she needs any help.

On the other hand perhaps Dylan decided to sue the makers of Factory Girl when he heard that Hayden Christensen had been cast as him, which would of course be a perfectly valid reason for litigation. Christensen is hopelessly out of his depth in a part which should carry serious weight; his ill-fated attempts to play Dylan leave him looking and sounding like he’s half-asleep. There’s little heat between him and Miller, something which is never clearer than during the excruciating soft-focus sex sequence which sees the two actors bumping and grinding in front of a roaring fireplace. The whole Dylan/Billy Quinn farrago only serves to undermine Factory Girl’s credibility even further, but the longer this film continues the more one respects Bob Dylan for disassociating himself from it.

The stories of Factory Girl’s troubled production have already been well publicised. Not only have the filmmakers had to contend with the threat of legal action, but there have been many rushed re-shoots and restructurings ordered by the Weinsteins; so perhaps after all that it comes as no surprise to find a finished product which is such a witless and confused mongrel of a film. It looks cheap, it feels stale, it has nothing to say about the characters who inhabit its story, and it has nothing to show us except yet another story of someone who lived fast, died young, and left a beautiful corpse behind. Christensen’s Not Dylan tells Sedgwick at one point that her heart is as empty as one of her friend’s soup cans; and if he had been referring to George Hickenlooper’s film itself, then he might have offered Factory Girl’s single moment of insight.

Review - TMNT

Last year we had Miami Vice, later this year we will be treated to Michael Bay’s take on Transformers, and now the latest stage in cinema’s current 80’s craze is with us. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were a most peculiar phenomenon; four human-sized amphibious creatures who dwelled in the sewers of New York after an encounter with some toxic waste had turned them into crime fighters with a fondness for pizza. To add to the overall sense of weirdness, each turtle was named after a Renaissance-era artist, and they were guided in their heroic deeds by their sensei, a large Japanese rat named Splinter.

This bizarre mix of elements proved to be a winning formula, with Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s underground comic suddenly exploding into the biggest franchise of the decade. A cartoon series followed, with action figures flying off the shelves, and the Turtles’ images soon started appearing on everything from t-shirts to video games to lunchboxes. A surprisingly decent live-action film was one of 1990’s box-office hits, before two progressively worse sequels finally seemed to bring their extraordinary reign to something of a close.

Now the green heroes are back on the big screen, 14 years after their last feature film. TMNT is a film which hopes to extend the Turtles’ appeal to a new generation of younger viewers while simultaneously capitalising on nostalgic twenty and thirty-somethings who are keen to relive their youth; but a misty-eyed view of the past can’t overlook this movie’s numerous failings. TMNT jettisons the impressive Jim Henson-created suits of the earlier pictures in favour of a complete CGI overhaul, but the story hasn’t received anything like as much attention as the aesthetics, and the result is a tepid, slapdash picture which never comes to life.

Time has not been kind to the central foursome, and their brotherhood is showing signs of strain at the movie’s start. Leonardo, the nominal leader of the group, has been away from New York for some time, being sent by Splinter to the dense jungle of Central America in order to hone his leadership skills. He spends most his time protecting local villagers from nasty clichéd bandits, and one day he bumps into former news reporter April O’Neil. She has turned her back on TV work and reinvented herself as some sort of archaeologist, running a precious artefacts service with boyfriend Casey Jones, and she fills Leo in on his brothers’ current positions.

Donatello is now stuck in a dull tech support job, Michelangelo spends his afternoons being beaten up at children’s parties while dressed as a cartoon turtle, and Raphael just sleeps all day - although he, unbeknownst to the others, actually spends his nights fighting crime as a vigilante called The Nightwatcher. Soon the brothers must swing back into action when the ridiculously tedious plot kicks into gear. An immortal billionaire resurrects a group of stone statues and hires Shredder’s former ninjas to recapture some monsters he unleashed 3,000 years ago in a series of dull flashbacks. Apparently these monsters have been terrorizing earth for the last three millennia even though nobody seems to have noticed them until now.

Writer/director Kevin Munroe’s screenplay lacks any sense of coherence or logic, and it arbitrarily switches direction frequently during the film’s uninvolving 90 minutes. TMNT takes an age to get its central narrative into motion, with masses of exposition to wade through in the early stages, and it never really raises itself beyond a certain level of mediocrity. The film offers glimpses of a more interesting story when it focuses on the damaged relationship between Leonardo and Raphael, but that’s the only time it ever looks like bringing anything new to the party. The fight scenes are a particular disappointment; with the beautifully rendered CGI animation on show being let down by bad direction and cluttered editing which too often obscures the action.

There’s a distinct lack of excitement about this whole movie and, unfortunately, there’s a distinct lack of charm too. The Turtles themselves are a success; they have been well crafted by the animators and each of them has their own clearly defining characteristic, but Donatello and Michelangelo may as well not exist for the way Munroe sidelines them and focuses on the central animosity between Leonardo and Raphael. Elsewhere, the animation of the human characters is simply appalling. April O’Neil and Casey Jones are all elongated bodies, angular faces and twisted mouths, with poor Casey being lumbered with an enormous chin and a strange blue-ish tint to his hair. None of the supporting characters really make much of an impact; Patrick Stewart’s Max Winters is an unmemorable nemesis, and Zhiyi Zhang’s halting delivery in her second language does her ninja character no favours.

Instead of building to a big finale, TMNT throws in a crazily incoherent climax in which the lack of a decent central villain is telling. Characters suddenly swap allegiances, things start blowing up, and April baffling turns into The Bride from Kill Bill - but the whole thing is a stunningly boring show. TMNT’s generic action and complete dearth of wit leaves the film looking like a wasted opportunity, and there’s only one moment which gives the film the shot of life it so desperately needs. The scene is a rooftop showdown between Leonardo and Raphael, with their bottled-up frustrations finally coming to the fore while the rain pours down - it’s a smashing sequence, but that’s all we get. TMNT tentatively hints at some semblance of depth underneath its glossy sheen, and then it decides to play it safe instead, crawling back into a shell which is as blandly anonymous as any other.

Review - After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet)

After the Wedding is a textbook example of a filmmaker excelling within her own comfort zone. The two films Susanne Bier has made before this picture - 2002’s Open Hearts and 2004’s Brothers - have been low-key but powerful dramas focusing on the family ties that bind, and in this regard After the Wedding is more of the same. Once again the director utilises an intimate, Dogme-style shooting style which is augmented with occasional aesthetic flourishes, and once more the screenplay has been provided by Bier’s regular collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen. With all of these familiar aspects in place it might seem as if Bier is simply repeating herself, but it’s hard to mind too much when the end result is executed with so much skill.

Like Brothers, After the Wedding is a story in which events in a far-off country have an impact at home. The film opens in India, introducing us to committed aid worker Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen) who has spent the past two decades doing his bit for the impoverished local children. But times are hard, with Jacob’s orphanage on the brink of bankruptcy, and when a Danish businessman offers to donate $4 million to the cause it’s an offer Jacob can’t refuse, even if it means travelling back to a country he thought he had left behind for good twenty years previously.

The rich philanthropist is Jørgen (Rolf Lassgård), but from his first meeting with Jacob this slightly aloof and self-absorbed character doesn’t seem particularly interested in the orphanage, casting a disinterested eye over the video Jacob has prepared, and he’s understandably distracted by the thought of his daughter’s upcoming nuptials. He invites Jacob to the next day‘s celebrations, promising to discuss the orphanage afterwards, but the wedding itself changes everything. When he turns up at the ceremony Jacob is stunned to see that Jørgen’s wife Helene (Sidse Babett Knudsen) is a woman with whom he has shared a very intimate history, and whose daughter Anna (Stine Fischer Christensen) is just about old enough to have been conceived at that time. That little surprise is merely the start of the revelations.

The fascinating thing about Susanne Bier’s films is the way they always rest on melodramatic incidents and plot contrivances which would have us rolling our eyes in the hands of most filmmakers, but she somehow makes them feel real. Anders Thomas Jensen’s screenplay is typically schematic - and arguably the weakest of his three collaborations with the director - and yet we still find ourselves wrapped up in the action, completely absorbed as the characters’ lives are turned upside down. Bier handles dramatic revelations as well as any other filmmaker working today, and the potency of these scenes is the key to her pictures’ success. When Jacob discovers the nature of his relationship to Anna it’s a tremendous moment; his eyes meet Helene’s from the back of the hall and the truth passes wordlessly between them.

Such scenes depend not only on the perceptiveness of the direction, but on the quality of the cast, and this is an aspect of Bier’s work which is set at a consistently astonishing level. Mads Mikkelsen - always a pleasure to watch - gives a reliably excellent leading display. It’s a marvellously subtle piece of acting as his self-affirmed outsider gets gradually drawn back into a life he never wanted, gaining new commitments and responsibilities in a breathtakingly short space of time. Lassgård is outstanding too; he initially comes across as rather bullish and dislikeable character, a man manipulating others for his own mysterious ends, but as the truth of his situation is revealed it becomes clear that his actions are motivated by love and fear, and the character’s final scenes in the film are deeply moving.

Bier traditionally gets great performances out of her female cast members, and After the Wedding is no exception. Knudsen excels as the mother whose past comes back to haunt her at what should be her proudest moment, with some dormant feelings being rekindled for this old flame, and Stine Fischer Christensen is extremely affecting in perhaps the film’s most difficult role. Her character, more than any other, is bombarded with a bewildering array of life-changing revelations in the space of just a few days, and she gives an admirable display; but the final surprise to hit Anna is also bad news for the film. The director overplays her hand slightly with this final twist of the emotional knife, and here the film threatened to slip into the kind of soapy melodrama which it had otherwise managed to steer clear of. That’s always the risk with this kind of picture, and Bier just about manages to get away with it here thanks to the strength of the characterisation and performances, but it does cause the picture’s final stages to feel a little overstretched.

There are other minor niggles which seem to be regular occurrences in Bier’s work; her frequent close-ups on aspects of the environment or the dead eyes of a stuffed animal don’t sit well with the rest of the film, and the juxtapositions in her staging are sometimes too obvious, but After the Wedding remains a film to get caught up in. It tackles the often complex relationships between family members - the secrets, the lies and the love - with as much insight and emotional truth as any film you’re likely to see this year, and it ends finally on a note of hope after a wrenching two hours. Susanne Bier might be operating well within her comfort zone, but with films like Open Hearts, Brothers and After the Wedding under her belt it seems churlish to complain.