Films I Didn't See at the Time Because of the Poster but Later Viewed and Discovered the Poster was Lying to Me #1: 'After the Wedding'

posted by Gareth Higgins

If you had been resident in the UK or Ireland around the time that the Danish film ‘After the Wedding’ was released, you might have seen this poster:

Happy people at a post-nuptials reception, in a manner that could put you in mind of the happy scenes in Bergman’s ‘Fanny and Alexander’ or a Scandinavian ‘Father of the Bride’, peppered with a liberal dose of what Borat would probably call ‘sexy-sex’, as indicated by the picture of the gorgeous woman staring into the Viking-like man’s eyes underneath.  This poster is the reason I didn’t see the film when it was showing in Belfast.

If, however, you had been living in Denmark, the poster used looked like this:

A couple of friends recently told me that ‘After the Wedding’ is one of the best films they’ve seen in the past few years; and so, given the proportionate lack of cost and hassle of Netflix, I rented it last night.

The UK poster is utterly misleading, because this is a profoundly powerful drama about life and meaning, and death and hope, regret and possibility.  Sure, there’s a wedding; and sure, the cute girl in the UK poster has an intense relationship with the guy, but it’s not what you think, and certainly not what the poster implies.

Mads Mikkelsen and Rolf Lassgård play the two male leads, men brought together by an accident; both of whom want to take life seriously enough to treat time with the respect it deserves; both of whom have reasons to want to be left alone.  My aversion to spoilers leaves me unable to say much more about the plot – let it suffice to say that there are things that happen to the characters in this movie that have happened to all of us; and there are things that the characters do that we might all wish to be able to imitate.

Lassgård in particular has a scene to play in which he does something with which every single viewer will be invited to identify; and something like compassion is brought to life by the fact that these characters (and the actors who play them) seem so real.  Of course the people who design posters are doing the best they can to get an audience into theatres; I just wonder if it might be possible to have a thumbnail on the bottom right hand corner of the poster or DVD box with the poster that the director wanted; the marketers of ‘After the Wedding’ would have got at least one more person to see it.

I’m not sure that ‘After the Wedding’ is doing much more than telling a new version of an old story – but that might be its genius.  It’s a cinematic construction, it’s got beautiful shots of nature, people weave in and out of each other’s lives, and real drama happens.  It’s not ‘Father of the Bride’ in Danish.  And so I’m happy to name it the first recipient of The Film Talk ‘Films I Didn’t See at the Time Because of the Poster and Later Viewed to Discover that the Poster was Lying to Me’ Award.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 8:01 am. It is filed under Blog, Character Actors, Drama, Gareth Higgins, Gareth Higgins Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.