After the Wedding

One of the Academy Award nominees for Best Foreign Language Film that didn’t win this year, Denmark’s After the Wedding is a melodramatic piece of work that puts the term in a positive light. Mads Mikkelson (who will probably end up being known the rest of his career as that bleeding-eye dude from Casino Royale) is the dedicated overseer of an Indian orphanage that reluctantly agrees to accept a wealthy Dane’s offer to help finance the struggling enterprise. Traveling to Copenhagen to iron out the details, he is coerced into attending the wedding of the entrepreneur’s daughter, during and after the course of which all sorts of hidden secrets and histories are slowly revealed. To a degree, a little too slowly, as After the Wedding tends to run a little long and dips a bit too easily into the cliché. However, despite the near soap-opera trappings the piece is still adeptly written and features some very strong performances that manage to make the proceedings far more compelling than one would expect.