European Films

Spoiler warning! Some plot twists are revealed in the following review.

The woman driving the car that hit Joachim is Marie (Paprika Steen), who -- in a state of shock herself -- desperately tries to find a mobile phone in order to call the emergency services. Joachim is brought to the nearest hospital and is operated on for hours. Marie tries to find solace with her husband Niels (Mads Mikkelsen) who works in the same hospital. He tries to convince her it was all an accident, but she feels rather guilty and shocked, also because their teenage daughter Stine was in the car with her when it happened and they were having a big fight when the accident happened.

It turns out Joachim will be paralysed from the neck down for the rest of his life. Despite the wedding ring he has given Cæcilie, he feels there is no place for her in this tragedy; she cannot spend the rest of her life with a man who will need help to do just about everything, someone who cannot make love to her anymore or even taker her in his arms. Cæcilie is desperate to be allowed to even see Joachim, but he refuses to see her. Doctor Niels, spurred on by his wife, makes contact with Cæcilie, who practically lives in the hospital’s waiting area and gives her his number in case she wants to talk with someone.

It is not too hard to figure out what will soon happen, as though it had been written in the stars: Niels takes his job comforting Cæcilie perhaps a bit too seriously, in that he falls head-over-heels in love with this fragile creature. He puts everything at risk just to be with her: his job, his family, his own sanity. His wife Marie is at first supportive of his visits to Cæcilie as her own sense of guilt over the accident haunts her. And Niels at first might only be driven by a Freudian sense of giving back Cæcilie what his family has taken from her: her boyfriend, his warmth, his company, his sex.

The story could have been a sappy melodrama about adultery and families hit by tragedy in a sort of chain-reaction, but Susanne Bier and her co-screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen have several ways of avoiding this pitfall and instead deliver an emotionally heart-wrenching film that is nothing short of a masterpiece. The dogme rules forced Bier to shoot with a hand-held camera only, to use no artificial sets but film only on real locations and to use no artificial lighting. All of these restrictions create a very austere  "home video" style that lends the cinematography a directness that would have been absent had it been filmed as a Hollywood production.

In a departure from the dogme rules, Bier also uses close-ups shot in Super-8 that sometimes intercut the scenes. Though they take some getting use to, they do finally work as a kind of subliminal voices of the characters and show the audience what they would really want to do or what they are thinking or dreaming of. Bier also knows to direct the actors in a way that can only be described as stunning. The entire ensemble delivers wonderful work as each character seems to be protagonist and antagonist at once. These are real people that try to make sense of what they are going through and all the characters suggest a life that exists way beyond their screen-time. Even the supporting actors, from a nurse at Joachim’s bedside to the adolescent Stine turn in wonderful performances.

The film feels like a powerful, coherent whole right up to its perfect ending. Niels, Cæcilie, Joachim and Marie might not be perfect people, but they are real. They try to live their lives according to what their hearts tell them and what their brains might not always logically explain. But the passion was there, and as one of the characters puts it: "I would do it all over again even knowing what I know now". One could argue that the Dogma movement has found its most accomplished expression to date in Open Hearts.

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