An accomplished Danish director admired on the festival circuit, Susanne Bier made seven movies that went unreleased here before her compelling human drama, Open Hearts, opened two years ago.
Her new film, Brothers, which won the audience award in the world cinema section at Sundance, marks a second fruitful collaboration with her Open Hearts screenwriter, Anders Thomas Jensen.
The older of the siblings in Brothers is Michael, a responsible man happily married with two young daughters. An army officer, he dutifully accepts his posting to a UN peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan. His brother Jannik, however, is a heavy-drinking, aimless drifter released from prison on the eve of Michael's departure.
In Afghanistan, one shocking incident follows another - the first depicted in an expertly staged action sequence that shatters the quiet early tone of the movie, the second in the chilling form of a morally challenging ultimatum.
To reveal any further would dilute the accumulating power of Bier's sensitively treated psychological drama. It derives from Bier and Jensen's evident mutual fascination with how ordinary lives can be transformed through extraordinary turns of events, creating radical changes in the personalities of those forced to deal with them. In Open Hearts, a young athlete was paralysed from the neck down in an accident shortly before he was due to be married, and he was memorably portrayed by Nikolaj Lie Kaas, who effectively captures the shifting personality changes undergone by Jannik in Brothers.
One of Scandinavian cinema's finest actors, Ulrich Thomsen (from Celebration, Inheritance and Kingdom of Heaven) indelibly etches the plight of his older brother when his orderly life comes under unbearable pressures. In the first film she has made in her native Denmark, Connie Neilsen, cast as his wife, displays a far greater range than she has been allowed in such Hollywood ventures as Devil's Advocate and Gladiator.
Brothers is as astutely observational as we have come to expect from Bier, whose firmly controlled exposition of a thoroughly unsettling scenario makes for what is arguably her most imaginative, thoughtful and telling film to date. Michael Dwyer
