Dolan Cummings
posted 20 April 2005

This is the tenth Danish Dogme film, and has that familiar Dogme feel about it, that feeling of being in a room with near strangers, conscious of the silences between words, and vaguely wanting to leave. If anything, this feeling is heightened by Olesen's determination to move on from the familiar disposition of Danish Dogme, the playful, not-to-be-taken-too-seriously attitude that has pervaded many of the films. In Your Hands is earnest, unironic and emotionally vulnerable.

The film is set in a women's prison, and does not disdain the clichés of that setting. Perhaps, after all, all women's prisons really do have a butch, domineering bully who intimidates the other prisoners, and collects impressionable young followers. The interplay between the prisoners, and with the guards, is convincing enough. No doubt relationships across the divide are not unheard of. The disruptive influence who acts as a catalyst for the drama is a young woman priest (presumably Lutheran) who becomes the prison chaplain. It is her personal conflict that forces the issue of one prisoner's reputed supernatural powers, with disastrous consequences.

Some of the best scenes take place between the priest, Anna, and her husband, chatting at home and in bed, where he looks forward to 'priest sex'. We learn that the couple are infertile, but more importantly we appreciate that, priest or not, these are basically northern European liberals, their attitudes and temperament derived from the postwar welfare consensus rather than any religious tradition. When Anna is quizzed by a prisoner on miracles - the virgin birth, the resurrection, that sort of thing - she is embarrassed and mumbles something about metaphor.

Then she gets pregnant. This follows an encounter with Kate, a new prisoner, who asks when her baby is due. When Anna learns that Kate has helped other prisoners mysteriously to get off drugs, she connects her unaccountable pregnancy with the prisoner, and is forced to countenance the possibility of an actual, literal miracle. There follow two parallel plots: in one, Kate forms a bond with a sympathetic male guard, and flirts with precarious happiness. In the other, Anna discovers that her miracle baby may be severely disabled, and is forced to make a decision about what to do, with her previous comfortable uncertainties disrupted and complicated by a radical new one. This is bad news for Kate.

The film lives up to its brief of being bleak - a feel bad movie, as Olesen puts it. There is something very unDogmelike about the suggestion that a character has supernatural powers, but I don't think it goes against the spirit of the 'vow of chastity'. Ultimately, this is a film about not being sure, even of whether or not one can be sure, and as such the supernatural theme is a crystallisation of real issues rather than an imposition. Partly as a consequence of this, though, the film is uneven. Kate's story has a tragic inevitability, but it is intertwined with Anna's which has no such structure, so that the denouement feels forced and unsatisfactory. Nonetheless, In Your Hands shows that there is life in Dogme yet, or at least in those directors and writers who are attracted to it and have ideas of their own to bring to it.