A SECOND CHANCE / EN CHANCE TIL - LFF14 - Day Five

A SECOND CHANCE is an intense and haunting drama from the Danish auteur Susanne Bier. She specialises in closely observed beautifully shot film that show what happens to ordinary people in difficult circumstances. In this film she looks at motherhood - the prejudices surrounding it, stresses entailed and the strange and powerful reactions to grief.

As the film opens, there are two contrasting couples with baby boys. The first - Tristan and Sanne - are junkies, and their baby Sofus is horribly neglected. This is set against the picture perfect couple of Andreas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Anna and their son Alexander. At first, our sympathies are utterly with Andreas and his police partner Simon (Ulrich Thomsen) - a kind of casual middle-class prejudice at the parenting suitability of the junkie couple. But the genius of this film is to turn around our preconceptions about what a good mother is and just how far a parent will go to keep a child with them.

To say more would be to give away crucial plot points that motivate the narrative. Suffice to say that this is an exceptionally well-made and acted film. Nicolaj Coster-Waldau gives what is surely a career-best performance. But I also really liked May Andersen as Sanne. Ultimately this is a movie that should be remembered for how it made us feel about parenting - and the right of a parent to be respected in that role, and the need not to rush to judgment.

A SECOND CHANCE has a running time of 105 minutes.  A SECOND CHANCE played Toronto and London 2014 and opens in Sweden and Denmark on January 15th.

IN A BETTER WORLD

IN A BETTER WORLD is a pretentious, po-faced drama about the impotence of liberals in the face of brutality. It works by inter-weaving four examples of bullying that affect an earnest Medecins Sans Frontieres doctor called Anton (Mikael Persbrandt). 

In a medical camp in Kenya, Anton is forced to treat the savage gangster who has been brutalising the women of the village. He shows the liberals' reluctance to judge, treating the Bad Man as his Hippocratic oath demands, despite the objections of the villagers. Back in Denmark, Anton is bullied by a mechanic. Once again, Anton refuses to defend himself - literally turning the other cheek, in order to show his children that intelligence has triumphed over ignorance by refusing to stoop to its level. His words sound unconvincing. By contrast, young Christian (William Jøhnk Juels Nielsen), recently bereaved, returned to Denmark, and friends with Anton's son, Elias, puts up a more muscular response to bullying. On his first day at school, he makes a moral judgement and intervenes to help the bullied Elias. And faced with the impotence of Elias' father - an impotence Anton claims is the high moral ground - Christian once again takes matters into his own hands. 

What can we say about this film? It is well acted (particularly by the two children), beautifully photographed (DP Morten Søborg using a Red One), and moves at a swift pace. But the characters are archetypes rather than real people - they exist to make a point rather than to involve us in their distress. As a result, the emotional scenes between Christian and his father (Ulrich Thomsen) do not have the emotional power that they should. Moreover, writer-director Susanne Bier fails to create tension, so clumsily does she foreshadow her climactic scenes. I also wonder whether Bier intended to so thoroughly discredit the possibility of Liberalism in her film. And I wonder whether the Academy realised that is what this movie did when it voted it the Best Foreign Language Film of 2010. It is, of course, no such thing.

IN A BETTER WORLD won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2011, beating Biutiful, Dogtooth, Incendies and Hors de la Loi. It also won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. IN A BETTER WORLD played Toronto 2010 and Sundance 2011. It was released in 2010 in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Italy. It was released earlier this year in Hungary, Brazil, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Spain, the USA, the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Russia, Singapore, Poland and Argentina. It is currently on release in Japan, Ireland and the UK.