Open Hearts

Name: Open Hearts
Genre: Drama, Romance
Released: February 21, 2003
Duration: 113 min
Rating: 77
Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Paprika Steen, Sonja Richter

2003

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Generally favorable reviews based on 22 Critic Reviews

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Generally favorable reviews based on 9 Ratings

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7.1	User Score Generally favorable reviews based on 9 Ratings

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Movie Details & Credits

Newmarket Films | Release Date: February 21, 2003 | R

Starring: Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Paprika Steen, Sonja Richter

Summary: Adhering to the guidelines of the celebrated Dogme 95 manifesto, this film focuses on a young engaged couple in Copenhagen who finds their relationship changed forever when the man is hit by a car and paralyzed.

Director: Susanne Bier

Genre(s): Drama, Romance

Rating: R

Runtime: 113 min

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Critic Reviews

Shawn Levy

Although the plot might sound like the stuff of a soap opera, a smart script, strong performances and an ideologically determined lack of filmmaking niceties result in a shattering, deeply felt work. Read full review

Gunnar Rehlin

Poignant, thoughtful and utterly absorbing, Susanne Bier's Dogme film Open Hearts is a gem. Read full review

Sean Axmaker

While the characters lack the quirks and affectations that have enlivened the impulsive figures from past Dogme films, the passion of the players and Bier's sensitive direction give these utterly normal figures a vivid aliveness, along with dignity and everyday beauty. Read full review

Kevin Thomas

The gritty, low-budget realism approach of the Dogme manifesto gives immediacy and edge to the raw emotions Bier and her cast uncover. Best of all, Bier never forgets that a little humor can relieve an awful lot of pain. Read full review

Steven Rea

Bier knows what she's doing, and the performances are expert and affecting. But this meditation on love -- and love's bad timing -- is also improbably accommodating to its characters' respective longings. Read full review

Rene Rodriguez

It is as emotionally raw and wrenching as life itself. Read full review

C.W. Nevius

And you thought Hamlet was a melancholy Dane. Compared with this gloomy group, he's Pee Wee Herman. Read full review

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User Reviews

lasttimeisaw

Jun 25, 2013

Dogme movement (1995-2005) is a terra incognita for me, although now it has officially existed only as a terminology thanks to the ubiquitous evasion of shooting on location with any cellphones or other handheld lighter gizmos, and its spirit has been ingested by more advanced mutants (e.g.Dogme movement (1995-2005) is a terra incognita for me, although now it has officially existed only as a terminology thanks to the ubiquitous evasion of shooting on location with any cellphones or other handheld lighter gizmos, and its spirit has been ingested by more advanced mutants (e.g. mumblecore). But Susanne Bier is not merely a Dogme enthusiast, AFTER THE WEDDING (2006 7/10) is a redoubtable relationship dissection and OPEN HEARTS (the new Hannibal Mads Mikkelsen star in both films) treads the same territory to examine the complexity of humans’ conundrum between desire and responsibility, ethics and emotions.

Two couples, one is engaged, another has 3 children, a car accident (not entirely abides by the Dogme rules though) turns their worlds upside down, a threat is common-or-garden both in the cinematic and real world; the life-changing mishap prompts an adultery between a middle class doctor and the disheartened fiancée, whose fiancé undergoes a permanent quadriplegia from the car accident where the doctor’s wife is the offender.

The face-fixated close-ups extensively put those characters under scrutiny for their rational and irrational behaviors, natural light commingles with saturated palette (during the beginning and the ending) and a black & white lens of the blurry and grainy illusory fancy. The cast is sterling, a quartet of tug-of-war from Mikkelsen, Richter, Lie Kass and Steen, a humdrum-weary family man holds his seven-year-itch infatuation to a damsel-in-distress; a comfort-seeker with abiding guilt of abandoning her bed-ridden fiancé; a young paralyzer who ruthlessly deserts his fiancée for his incompetence as a proper man but still hankers for her company; a wife is rueful of her road rage and its tragic repercussions, suddenly devastated by her husband’s utter betrayal; Steen’s impromptu slapping and Mikkelsen’s reaction are among the best on-screen intensified scenes I have even seen, three of the four leads end up in my yearly top 10 list (guess who narrowly missed the spot?).

But on the other hand, the melodramatic core of the story hobbles a soul-searching catharsis and empathetic introspection which would put the film onto an upper notch, Bier and DP Morten Søborg’s camera is erratic but not dizzily shaky, the fly-on-the-wall intimacy allows us to take a much closer look at the symptoms and the cause of the frailty resides in every soul on earth, and offers us staying in a paralleled world, munches with palliative pills to ease our own troubles.… Expand

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