Thursday, April 03, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Open Hearts makes a surgical strike on emotions

By Anthony Allison

Damn those Danes are great. They can transform the most trite, obvious scenario into agonizingly good drama that sears the soul.

"She's 23," says Open Hearts' scorned wife to her unfaithful husband, "not much older than the shirt you're wearing." It sounds like bad dialogue from a lousy soap opera. But in the context of this superbly acted movie, the words zing with pure emotional truth.

A plot synopsis, too, makes Susanne Bier's film sound like an unhappy mix of Fatal Attraction, Bitter Moon and Whose Life Is It Anyway? After grad student Joachim (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is hit by a car and paralyzed from the neck down, his beautiful fiancee Cecilie (Sonja Richter) seeks solace with a middle-aged doctor, Niels (Mads Mikkelsen). Niels happens to be married to the driver of the car, Marie (Paprika Steen), and their rebellious teenage daughter Stine (Stine Bjerregaard) soon suspects that dad's solicitous interest in the distraught young blonde is more than strictly professional.

Yet from this seemingly unpromising material, Bier and co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen have forged a script full of the usual, cliched suspects that somehow miraculously avoids the usual movie-of-the-week cliches. The Tortured Quadriplegic cruelly rejects his Young Lover, insisting she mustn't selflessly sacrifice her life, and her sexuality, on the altar of loyalty. But Kaas conveys all the pain, self-loathing and expletive-spewing bitterness of a healthy man realizing that his life has been irrevocably altered, and Richter is agonizingly good as the woman devastated by his cruel rejection.

Later, after the Raging-Hormones Adolescent reveals the Awful Truth and the Cuckolded Wife confronts the Other Woman, the film rejects the rabbit-stew moments or climactic showdowns because hell hath no fury like a mistress scorned. Instead, Bjerregaard displays perfect thespian poise belying her age, and Steen lives up to her first name, with a peppery sting of agony as the woman battling to save her marriage. Even Mikkelsen somehow elicits a smidge of sympathy as the tired family man who, with no compunction, literally leaps on the chance to scratch his seven-year itch with the vulnerable Cecilie.

The superlative cast, including Birthe Neumann as Joachim's long-suffering nurse, is one reason the film unerringly hits its emotional target. But that bull's-eye punch also owes much to the quasi-documentary feel of this, the 28th Dogme movie.

Never mind that Dogme 95 was the dumbest, most pretentious idea since the French New Wave. This artistic manifesto of a few Danish filmmakers renounced "certain tendencies" in modern cinema in favor of supposedly purer filmmaking techniques: hand-held 35mm cameras, direct sound and location shooting with no artificial props, effects or music, and a prohibition on genre movies and superficial action (murders and weapons).

Like the self-conscious, horribly dated style of many Nouvelle Vague exemplars (Godard's Breathless, Malle's Zazie dans le Metro), the resulting footage tends to detract from the drama, rather than enhance it.

Yet the best Dogme movies have overcome the limitations of the draconian rules of the "Vow of Chastity," which has always been honored more in the breach than the observance. (Here there's added music, credits for costume designer, makeup artist and, cardinal sin, the director, who bookends her film with stylized street scenes, processed in a garish swirl of psychedelic colors, that flagrantly flout the "no filters or optical work" rule.)

Among the best Dogme efforts were Lars von Trier's oddball study of orgiastic dropouts The Idiots, Thomas Vinterberg's devastating sexual-abuse drama The Celebration, Soren Kragh-Jacobsen's whimsical portrait of misfits Mifune, and Kristian Levring's Lear-in-the-desert The King Is Alive. Open Hearts is a welcome addition to this impressive list. You'll quickly forgive and forget the jerky camerawork, disconcerting jump cuts, harsh lighting and boomy sound as this drama grabs you by the heartstrings and doesn't let go.