Open Hearts (15)<br></br>Russian Ark (U)

Fools for love

A film that claims to be "about losing control, looking life in the face, and having the courage to go for the love of your life" is a film one should usually run a mile from. The line can be found in the press notes to Open Hearts and, along with that title, seems to confirm the film's status as a regular American sobfest about "personal growth". Hollywood turns out these movies by the dozen, and sells them in exactly the same way.

But Open Hearts is not from Hollywood at all, it's from Denmark, and it would be more appositely titled "Open Wounds". While Susanne Bier's film uses the scaffolding of melodrama, it never settles for the obvious emotional effects of the form. Life cracks open, relationships buckle under pressure and agonising ruptures ensue, but Anders Thomas Jensen's screenplay investigates his characters in such a way that simple pity isn't an adequate response; we also feel curious about them, and repelled, and baffled. This is always the case when people in a drama seem to have lives of their own.

At one level this is a piercingly acute study in guilt. Cecilie (Sonja Richter) isn't happy about her fiancé Joachim (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) going off on a dangerous rock-climbing holiday, but in the end she acquiesces. As she's waving goodbye to him at the station, a car blindsides him; he's rushed to hospital where the doctor on duty, Niels (Mads Mikkelsen), happens also to be the husband of the woman, Marie (Paprika Steen) who was driving the car. Joachim is left paralysed from the neck down, and Marie, stricken with remorse, asks Niels to check up on the distraught girlfriend. One accident begets another: Joachim, embittered and unreachable, refuses to see Cecilie; she finds solace in Niels's company; and Niels finds himself falling in love with her. His adolescent daughter Stine (Stine Bjerregaard) is quick to notice this change, for she, too, is excruciated by guilt: she was in the car telling her mother to hurry when the collision happened.

Filming under the Dogme code of principles – handheld camera, no artificial lighting, no music – Bier achieves an extraordinary degree of intimacy, particularly in the workaday family life of Marie and Niels. The latter's averted glance, for example, when Marie raises the possibility of a fourth child, and her almost hungry look as as she watches him showering, are enough to suggest a precarious imbalance in their marriage. Occasionally Bier throws in a fleeting close-up, shot with extra grain and scored by the camera's whirring, to signal some kind of wishful reverie; thus the image of Joachim waving to her as she leaves his hospital room is a poignant projection of Cecilie's yearning – she knows it can never be.

With so much angst to go around, one might be inclined to believe Open Hearts is a harrowing experience, yet it's not, or not entirely. For one thing, the observation is salted with a wry comedy that undercuts even potentially painful scenes; when Stine turns up at Cecilie's flat to confront her about the affair with her father, Cecilie wrongfoots her completely by remarking on how her hair is different from the last time they met – the time when Stine stepped out of her mother's car and was dumbstruck by the sight of Joachim's blood. As his affair gathers momentum Niels, distracted by his two young sons on a supermarket trip while he tries to talk to Cecilie on his mobile, finds that he has brought home bagfuls of sweets, an absent-mindedness that his wife finds merely puzzling.

What's also curious about the drama is that, for all the rawness of feeling it probes, there is an amazing spirit of forbearance at large. One finds something almost saintly in the patience of the middle-aged nurse Hanne (Birthe Neumann), as she endures the obscene insults and taunts that miserable Joachim hurls at her; there were several moments when I longed to see her respond with a really good punch, but she heroically refrains. I wonder if the film is making a case for the Danish national character, because Cecilie, too, seems blessed with a remarkable ability to forgive; in just about any other movie the victim's girlfriend would have raged against the person who, however unwittingly, had destroyed part of her life. Indeed, in a Hollywood movie the drama would have had quite a different complexion. It wouldn't be a doctor who'd turn up to comfort Cecilie, but a lawyer with a damages suit. Forget open hearts – they just want open chequebooks.

For sheer virtuosity, Russian Ark will take some beating. Filming in a single, unbroken 96-minute take, the director Aleksandr Sokurov conducts us on a startling tour of St Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum, in which two centuries of Russian history have been immaculately recreated. The camera glides from room to room, from one tableau vivant to another, following people around like a restless eavesdropper: there goes Catherine the Great, and here comes Czar Nicholas and Alexandra with their children, and who are those Soviet worthies huddling in the corner? Our guide, narrating in whispery voiceover, is as hypnotised as we are ("What kind of play is this?" he wonders), and the dreamlike atmosphere is heightened when one tailcoated dignitary, "the spy", detaches himself from the wandering crowds to address him.

The film is alive to the occasionally slumbrous nature of its time-travelling. As the Czar addresses an emissary delegation from Persia in ringing imperial tones, the spy cuts in to remark on the hours of "terrible boredom" that will follow, and leads us away. As pageant it's impressive, but as drama it's lightweight, and the trance one falls into may not be entirely inspired by awe. Still, it saves the best till last: the vivid bustle of a costumed ball with full orchestra, and the massed procession down the staircase at its close have a melancholy grandeur that won't be forgotten. We seem to be watching not just a crowd leaving a ballroom, but souls melting into history.