A SECOND CHANCE
DIRECTOR: Susanne Bier
CAST: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Maria Bonnevie, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, May Andersen, Ulrich Thomsen, Ewa Froling
CLASSIFICATION: 16 LVD
RUNNING TIME: 104 minutes
RATING: ***
The smartest thing about Danish director Susanne Bier’s manipulative psychological drama En Chance Til( A Second Chance) is that it stars Nikolaj Coster-Waldau ( pictured). Fans of Game of Thrones will know him as Jaime Lannister, who throws a child out of a window in the first episode, but here he’s cast as a man resorting to desperate, arguably ridiculous measures to save a child and his tragedy-stricken family.
Unfortunately, the rest of the film, apart from the cast, has few redeeming features.
The skittishly-edited opening scenes establish a compare-and-contrast parallel between two families. Police detective Andreas (Coster-Waldau) lives with his wife Anne (Bonnevie) and their infant son Alexander in a seaside house in a provincial part of Denmark. Heroin addict and ex-con Tristan (Lie Kaas) and his girlfriend Sanne (Andersen) also have a baby boy, Sofus, who’s the same age as Alexander. However, their child is horribly neglected.
When Andreas and his partner bust Tristan for drugs-related offences, Andreas tries to have Sofus taken into care, but the authorities don’t have sufficient grounds. But a shocking turn of events puts in train a course of events that will affect both families.
Viewers might understandably assume that the film is trying to counterpoint nice middle-class parenting vs scummy working-class parenting. Ultimately, it is indeed doing just that, but the twists are contrived to tweak these class assumptions by revealing that not is all it seems at Andreas and Anne’s home.
A Second Chance seems to have it in for mothers. Anne is suffering from serious post-partum depression. Sanne has neglected her child to a shocking degree. Anne’s mother, an icy rich bitch, has barely met her grandchild. When the tragedies start to pile up on Andreas, his boss demands he speak to someone about his troubles. “But not your mother!” she demands, as if even this seemingly harmless bourgeois matron is not to be trusted.
Perhaps that’s reading too much intentionality into the film. In all probability, the anti-maternal bias stems from a desire to play with audience expectations, especially given Danish filmmakers’ tendency to lionise their female characters.
Nevertheless, outside of the strong Danish cast, subtlety is not the film’s strong suit. Ominous music announces early on that a Bad Thing is going to happen any minute, a promise fortified by spooky establishing shots of wintry trees, fog-shrouded bridges and murky waters. At the end of the film, a child draws attention to a hammer in a shopping basket: one wonders if it was intended to hit viewers over the head with the filmmakers’ message. – The Hollywood Reporter
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