A father’s love can take many forms.  The way a father’s love plays out is central to Susanne Bier’s film, After the Wedding.  But it’s not as simple as it sounds, because it involves two fathers and how they show love or learn to love.

We don’t know any of the family dynamics when the film opens—we don’t even know of any family connection for some time into the film.  Jacob has been living in India for many years.  He has put his wild and reckless past behind him and has been working in an Indian orphanage.  There he has one particular orphan he is especially close to, Pramod.  Jacob has to make a trip to Europe to meet a businessman who wants to give a sizable contribution to the orphanage, but insists on meeting Jacob first.  Jacob promises Pramod to be back before his birthday.  Jacob doesn’t like Europe.  He has taught Pramod that the houses are too far apart, so the people never learn how to be close.  He plans for this to be a quick trip.

Once he gets to Denmark things get more complicated.  Jorgen invites Jacob to his daughter’s wedding since Jacob has nothing else to do for the weekend.  He discovers that Jorgen is now married to Jacob’s former girlfriend whom he hasn’t seen since she left India and he stayed.  Do you begin to see the web becoming tangled?

There is a wonderful ambiguity about this film.  The viewer often wonders just what kind of game Jorgen is playing.  It’s just too much of a coincidence that he’s called this guy from halfway around the world and has no idea of the previous relationship.  Is Jorgen being kind with this reunion, or is it an act of cruelty?  What is to gain from all the turmoil that this manipulation creates?  What does Jorgen think he is buying with his donation to the orphanage?

Bier’s films often give us an interesting look into family life as something that paradoxically is a place of trauma and of healing.  In Brothers she used the differences and similarities between two brothers as the setting for the healing of wounds from within and outside of the family. In Open Hearts, spouses and fiancés are the source of comfort or pain.  In After the Wedding, the relationship that comes to the fore is that of father to child.  Jorgen, we find, really is acting out of his love for his daughter, even if he is not her genetic father.  Jacob must make a difficult choice of how he will live out his love for the family he does not know and for Pramod back in India.

We discover that sometimes a father’s love works itself out in sacrificial ways.  Out of love a father may do things that go against his own interest for the sake of his child.  Sometimes those sacrifices can cut to the very core of one’s life.

One of the key metaphors often used for God is that of father.  It can be an intriguing contemplation to reflect on the ways God’s love for us is like a father and how God has been made known to us through such sacrificial love.