Open Hearts

Having just watched this film, I had to write something. Totally stunned by the film and its depth. The acting was superb, with totally believable characters involved with an amazing script. I would rate this as probably the most impacting film I have watched. I would recommend watching this film with a loved one. Don't miss any chance to watch this.

The music score is first class, and fits exactly with the tone of the film. Having not seen the actors before, my next task will be to find out what else they and the director have been involved with, in the hope that another gem exists of similar quality.

Enough has been said about the Dogme rules, and the many movies that have been made with the certificate. No matter if you like the concept or not, Dogme will always ad a great amount of realism into a movie. And in "Elsker Dig Forevigt"/"Open Heart" the realism is very strong. Probably stronger in any of the other Dogme-films I have seen.

Even more realistic the movie gets from the acting, which is outstanding. I found Mads Mikkelsen a bit under-achieving in the beginning, but as the drama gets more intense – so does Mikkelsen. He is Niels, the soft, modern, Danish family-man, who is as good with the kids as he is with his job. Other of Mikkelsen's parts has been very far from that, not least playing Tonny in Refn's "Pusher" and "Pusher II".

The wife of Niels, Marie, is well performed by Paprika Steen. Danish movies have had a reputation (in Denmark) that they are all dull, everyday-dramas with Paprika Steen in a leading role. "Elsker Dig..." has probably played a part in creating this reputation. It's not really fair, firstly because Danish movies are a lot more than that and secondly because Steen is really good. In "Elsker Dig…" she shows great dept in her acting, and in one of the best scenes in the movie Marie's 'house-wife-facade' breaks down, showing that Marie is a lot stronger than what you could have expected. It's a difficult scene, but Steen carries it out very well.

As the third corner stone of the triangle Sonja Richter is the young woman Cæcilie who's boyfriend Joachim (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is severely injured, when he gets run down by Marie, driving a bit too fast. The performances by Richter and Kaas are as spotless as they are outstanding.

I have to comment on the children in this movie. It rarely works really well, because children aren't actors. But the teenage daughter of Niels and Marie, Stine (Stine Bjerregaard), has a lot to offer. She too has a big scene, again it works, and it's brilliant. The younger brothers, Gustav and Emil, works very good too. These kids aren't 'acting' they are 'living' their parts. Stop casting wonder-kids, and look this way!

This thing is normally not my thing. But still I rated this movie high – because it is a good movie. I generally like realism in movies (which I guess this review unveils) and that is 100% here.

A Bergmanesque study of a marriage that is turned upsidedown by one part mishap and one part momentary lapse of reason. What's provocative here, and makes for an intelligent and moving film, is the way in which the spurned wife (played with quiet dignity by the estimable Paprika Steen) doesn't dish up deserved revenge, quivering hatred or physical or mental violence. but, rather, offers an attempt to understand, to accept, and to hold the family together regardless. How rare is this? The line that stays with me - and it's a casual aside but one that cuts straight to the bone - is Paprika telling her husband's mistress that `we can't even afford' the new furniture he has lavished on her.

Once the film hits its groove, its DOGME origins are forgotten and we're left with intimacy and the thousand and one little tragedies that unfold on any given day of any given week. It could be said to be modest in scope, somewhat uninventive in form, and it does immerse itself uncritically in the middle class milieu (and in this respect, I would liken it to Moretti's `La Stanza del Figlio' - except that film does seem to express a suppressed distaste for Berlusconi's Italy), but there's an honesty and maturity that make it a valuable experience - particularly for any teenager used to a soap opera diet of hysterical marriage operatics. or for anyone still recovering from `Festen'.

At its best, and there's a frisson of that here, DOGME-95 has delivered fresh slices of life (or, to elaborate, privileges a panorama of personal battles against a recognisably familiar backdrop) - its Vows of Chastity whittling the camera down to something akin to a microscope.

Dogme movement (1995-2005) is a terra incognita for me, although now it has officially existed only as a terminology thanks to the ubiquitous evasion of shooting on location with any cellphones or other hand-held lighter gizmos, and its spirit has been ingested by more advanced mutants (e.g. mumblecore). But Susanne Bier is not merely a Dogme enthusiast, AFTER THE WEDDING (2006 7/10) is a redoubtable relationship dissection and OPEN HEARTS (the new Hannibal Mads Mikkelsen star in both films) treads the same territory to examine the complexity of humans' conundrum between desire and responsibility, ethics and emotions.

Two couples, one is engaged, another has 3 children, a car accident (not entirely abides by the Dogme rules though) turns their worlds upside down, a threat is common-or-garden both in the cinematic and real world; the life-changing mishap prompts an adultery between a middle class doctor and the disheartened fiancée, whose fiancé undergoes a permanent quadriplegia from the car accident where the doctor's wife is the offender.

The face-fixated close-ups extensively put those characters under scrutiny for their rational and irrational behaviors, natural light commingles with saturated palette (during the beginning and the ending) and a black & white lens of the blurry and grainy illusory fancy. The cast is sterling, a quartet of tug-of-war from Mikkelsen, Richter, Lie Kass and Steen, a humdrum-weary family man holds his seven-year-itch infatuation to a damsel-in-distress; a comfort-seeker with abiding guilt of abandoning her bed-ridden fiancé; a young paralyzer who ruthlessly deserts his fiancée for his incompetence as a proper man but still hankers for her company; a wife is rueful of her road rage and its tragic repercussions, suddenly devastated by her husband's utter betrayal; Steen's impromptu slapping and Mikkelsen's reaction are among the best on-screen intensified scenes I have even seen, three of the four leads end up in my yearly top 10 list (guess who narrowly missed the spot?).

But on the other hand, the melodramatic core of the story hobbles a soul-searching catharsis and empathetic introspection which would put the film onto an upper notch, Bier and DP Morten Søborg's camera is erratic but not dizzily shaky, the fly-on-the-wall intimacy allows us to take a much closer look at the symptoms and the cause of the frailty resides in every soul on earth, and offers us staying in a paralleled world, munches with palliative pills to ease our own troubles.

A girl whose boyfriend went paraplegic because of a car crash falls in love with the husband of the woman that ran her fiancée over. Though the plot may look like a twisted soap opera the fact is that the movie of Akeson & Olesen is such an intense and wise portrait of human emotions. Feeling of guilt, love, infidelity... no flowery stuff and no useless decorations. "Open hearts" is a piece of life.

Despite the directors probe to know their job their movie wouldn't be the same without the impressive work of the extraordinary actors she chose. Propably none of them will won an Oscar, and they're not very popular, but they'd deserve to be big stars.

Another great contribution of DOGMA movement to last decade's cinema.

*My rate: 9/10