1.78:1 DVD capture: After the Wedding The Film

Online critic N.P. Thompson recalls a colleague lamenting the absence of cell phones in Ingmar Bergman's recent swan song Saraband, and in many ways, Susanne Bier's overwrought but not ineffectual After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet) is Bergman for these manic times. A fashionable strain of Western self-loathing courses through this tale of a fat cat, Jørgen (Rolf Lassgård), who summons Jacob (once and future Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen), the Danish head of a Bombay orphanage, to his office in Denmark, ostensibly to size up another potential almsman. In actuality, Jørgen is in the advanced stages of a terminal illness and wants to groom Jacob--his wife's ex-lover, as well as the biological father of his daughter--to replace him, if more at the dinner table than in the boardroom. Swapping the iris filter of her Brothers (Brødre) for a no-less-mannered eye motif (at various intervals, After the Wedding inappropriately resembles either a spaghetti western or a Lucio Fulci movie), Bier seems to dread directorial anonymity now that she's untethered from the legitimately-undistinguished Dogme95 aesthetic. Still, the performances manage to weather these hyperactive cutaways, with Lassgård proving in his wrenching final scene that you can drop the Big Daddy façade without dishonouring the archetypal dying patriarch of Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams.-BC

Through Genius Products, IFC brings After the Wedding to DVD in a relatively stunning 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer--"relatively" referring to one's experience with Danish cinema, which generally lacks the level of clarity this presentation achieves. It helps not only that the film was shot in 35mm instead of the de rigueur DV, but also that they went with an NTSC master instead of the de rigueur PAL conversion. Oddly, I was reminded of the way that "Arrested Development" looks in HiDef (a compliment). Meanwhile, the accompanying DD 5.1 audio is aggressively loud for what often amounts to a chamber piece. Extras include a 22-minute interview with director Susanne Bier conducted in her native tongue by Morten Piil, who's fairly sycophantic but asks a promising question or two, at one point getting his subject to all but admit that she abandoned the comedy genre (her laffer The One and Only was a smash hit in Denmark) because it doesn't travel well and therefore makes less sense from a commercial standpoint. By and large, neither interviewer nor interviewee is especially insightful, though Piil has picked up on the incongruity of After the Wedding's extreme close-ups and tries in vain to get Bier to intellectualize them. She's kind of unicorns and rainbows, to be honest, and only comes off less so since the spoken word is weighted with more authority when subtitled. I preferred Bier's thorough, 7-minute introduction to a batch of eight deleted scenes (well, seven and a compilation of the home videos shot by "Jacob" in India), in part because they spare you the trouble of actually sitting through the elisions. She also redeems herself a bit here in asserting to returning moderator Piil that movies are too long nowadays--moreover, that they have an organic length often violated by a filmmaker's lack of self-discipline. After the Wedding's trailer plus a startup reel of previews for Private Fears in Public Places, The Exterminating Angels, Russian Dolls, and Gabrielle round out the disc.-Bill Chambers

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DVD VITALS:
Running Time
119 minutes
MPAA
R
Aspect Ratio(s)
1.78 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
Danish DD 5.1
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English, Spanish
DVD-9
Region One
IFC

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Published: July 3, 2007