In Your Hands DVD Review:

In Your Hands tells the story of Anna, recently ordained a priest, who volunteers for the position of prison chaplain at an all-female prison. Anna and her husband, we soon learn, have been trying for a baby for many years when she is asked by one of the prisoners who seems lost, but hardly talks to her, that she is expecting. When it turns out that the prediction, or guess, was true, Anna becomes fascinated with the girl, Kate, hearing rumours that circulate in the prison about her power to heal others. The lives of the two women become intertwined in ways that neither they (in the critical cliché) but more importantly the viewer could not predict.

In your hands is the tenth and latest film to be issued with the ‘Dogme’ certificate, joining a select group of films that includes most famously Lars von Trier’s ‘The Idiots’ and Thomas Vinterberg’s ‘Festen.’ Both of these were bad boy films, social satires where shame was forced on the spectator; the documentary style hooked us even while we knew we were going to swallow something unpleasant sooner or later. This is all quite different from Olsen’s manner, who is more conventionally interested in her subjects, in a way that you imagine von Trier and Vinterberg might consider a bit wussy. It’s hard to imagine that many even among the critics would have noticed that this was a Dogme film, if it hadn’t been announced to us.

Olsen is genuinely interested in her characters; everybody in prison has a story, we discover, according to the liberal way of looking at things, but not all of them turn out to be gratifying to the main character as she unveils them. The film centres around her confrontation with a force that lies beyond her, in Kate’s miraculous gift of healing: something from beyond the world of conventional faith, embodied in a woman who turns out to be beyond the female priest’s powers of forgiveness. The story plays with its own sincerity in the account of healing, using it as an agnostic means to test all the characters of the film.

The performances in this film hold it together, more than the narrative or even the themes, without sliding into the twin perils of the Dogme method – melodrama and feel-bad manipulation of the spectator.

Extras

The extras are few but choice. The longest feature is an interview with Annette Olsen at the Curzon Soho at the time of the film’s release in this country, responding t questions from a critic and from the audience. She talks widely and intriguingly on the research she and others, including her husband, did for the film (it was shot in a real prison). as well as the amount of improvisation that was involved while filming. Unusually Olsen gave her actors not the scripts but the parts to think about (though this recalls Mike Leigh’s practice), before revealing that it was a film about life in a prison. Her second interview goes through similar material, without being repetitious. The three principal female actors in the film are also presented, and it was only watching the actress who played Kate at this point that I realised how unnaturally still she had been for most of the film.

There are several sequences of shooting and off camera chatting in the ‘Behind the Scenes’ extras, including points where the actors rewrite their own dialogue.

All in all a satisfactory transfer to DVD; there were no problems with the subtitles which, without speaking Danish, seemed to be saying the right things when people were speaking and didn’t start up or trail on when they weren’t.



Dominic Gavin