What's with Hollywood's recent obsession with remaking Danish director Susanne Bier's work? First there was Brothers and now I just discovered on IMDB.com that there is a remake to her After the Wedding in the works. The film so far, according to the website, is to star Tom Wilkinson and Camilla Belle and to be directed by Michael Canton-Jones who has made some very good films (This Boy's Life, Rob Roy) and some really bad ones (The Jackal, Basic Instinct 2).
The story of the original film revolves around one of those impossibly complex Bier situations in which a missionary is sent from India to Denmark in hopes of securing a charitable donation from a wealthy businessman. There for the weekend, the rich man invites the missionary to his daughter's wedding only for the visitor to find out that the girl is the daughter he never knew he had from a fling with the rich man's wife from many years ago.
I love Susanne Bier; probably more so than even the highly praised Danish Dogme 95 filmmakers like Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier. Her films are both painful and human as she places characters into impossible situations that have no resolutions other than for the people involved to deal with what is happening. Her debut Open Hearts was the sad examination of a man who, after being paralyzed from the neck down, forces his girlfriend to break up with him, only for her to fall in love with his doctor, essentially wrecking that family in the process and, well, you surely must know what Brothers is about.
Whether After the Wedding will be more or less an exact remake like Brothers or not has yet to be be made known, but it still seems as though Bier's films lose something in translation. They aren't as hard and complex and lose a little bit of their humanity in exchange for expensive polish. Even Bier herself had trouble translating her formula into Hollywood success with her good but strangely uninvolving Things We Lost in the Fire with Halle Berry and Benicio del Toro. I guess we'll just have to wait and see for now.
No comments:
Post a Comment