Negotiating Special Relationships: Susanne Bier’s Comedies

Abstract

‘Negotiating Special Relationships: Susanne Bier’s Comedies’ highlights the diversity of Bier’s films by analyzing her comedies, which, Gunhild Agger argues, borrow from and innovate characteristics derived from distinct romantic comedy traditions. Agger reads Bier’s The One and Only (Den eneste ene 1999) as a Danish language, screwball comedy best understood as a modern take on a template established by Classical Hollywood films. Meanwhile, Agger connects Love Is All You Need to trends in romantic comedy that are visible in more recent British and American films, most notably Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), which inspired a number of transatlantic co-productions targeting the massive audience it attracted. In outlining key features of these films, Agger highlights that Love Is All You Need is significantly more cross-cultural and transnational than The One and Only and explicitly utilizes formal and narrative devices to cite its American and British predecessors. She also stresses that while the film is mainly in Danish, it includes aspects of English and Italian languages and cultures as part of its appeal to transnational spectators.