While After the Wedding doesn't adhere to all, or even many, of the rules of Dogma 95, the film's twitchy handheld camerawork and strong performances by actors pushed to extremes of emotion seem to demonstrate Susanne Bier's continuing commitment to at least some of the group's technical and aesthetic principles. It's an affecting film, to be sure, that carefully and thoughtfully works its way through a complex moral equation. And perhaps, when we reach the end, we feel that the characters have arrived at the right answer. I suppose this depends on how we read the somewhat ambiguous final shot, a close-up of Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen) watching his surrogate son, Pramod (Neeral Mulchandani), playing on the dirt soccer pitch that his deal with Jørgen (Rolf Lassgård) has paid to improve. Neither Jørgen nor Pramod are visible in the shot, nor are Jacob's new family, Helene (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and Anna (Stine Fischer Christensen), who he both finds and recovers thanks to Jørgen's intervention. But all of these characters, their needs and their dependency on Jacob, perhaps also their debt to him, are present in the lingering gaze of the camera, which (handheld again) seems to hang in the air like a question until Jacob responds with a very brief, very slight smile. Still, what seems to be a final answer is followed by a documentary montage of Bombay's streets and slums playing under the end credits. Earlier in the film, Jacob and Jørgen, still learning to love each other, bat statistics about Bombay's impoverished children back and forth like tennis balls, but they never really address their situation seriously as a potentially resolvable problem. Those children "over there," as Jørgen says, remain statistics, only signified by the inadequate video images of children at the orphanage, most of whom operate as a kind of set dressing for Jacob's close-ups of Pramod. Jørgen, when asked why he's funding Jacob's orphanage, as well as orchestrating the reunion of Jacob, Helene, and Anna, claims that he's "just a good person," and also that his actions will allow him "buy remission for [his] sins." This last answer creates another ambiguous moment. Is Jørgen serious, or is he referring ironically to the sins he knows Jacob believes he must have committed as an immensely successful Western capitalist? Perhaps we read the ending of this somewhat perverse family saga as happy. At least relatively. Is happiness ultimately dependent on the fat capitalist pig's death? And what does his passing make way for, exactly? Like the final shot's lingering camera, a number of questions remain about the meaning and nature of intervention, goodness, love, family, and need. For this week's post, I'd like you to reflect on After the Wedding's network of moral negotiations, and I'd particularly like you to consider what broader implications they may have for the relationship between East and West, Developing and Developed, the philanthropist and the receiver of aid, or other formulations like this. Looking forward to your comments, as always.
Is this the final shot of After the Wedding?
Or is this?
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