Dir.
Annette K Olesen, 2004, Denmark, 101 min, subtitles
Cast:
Ann Eleonora Jørgensen, Trine Dyrholm, Lars Ranthe
Anna, a theology graduate, gets offered the job of temporary prison chaplain in a women's prison. Anna's Christian faith is steadfast, and she has philosophical answers for inmates who ask her if she believes Jesus could walk on water. Her belief that her faith is absolute is unshakeable. A new inmate, Kate, arrives at the prison who has been convicted of murdering her baby. The other inmates tell Anna that Kate has special healing powers. Anna's faith begins to stir in light of the prisoners belief in Kate's abilities and their apparent manifestation, things that Anna cannot reconcile. Meanwhile Anna and her husband are trying for a baby. To their delight Anna becomes pregnant, but when things begin to go wrong her faith is shaken to the core and her thoughts turn to Kate's healing hands.
In Your Hands is director Annette K Olesen's second film and one she decided to make under Dogme rules. Taking over a block at Nyborg State Prison in Denmark, the cast and crew lived and breathed the Dogme agenda, very briefly that the film must be shot on location with no extra frills such as music, lighting, special effects or gimmicks like flashbacks or fantasy. This doesn't seem to have inhibited Olesen and her cast in any way who all turn out strong and emotive performances in a film that bravely tackles the thorny subjects of morality, religion, gender, addiction and deprivation.
At the top of Olesen's agenda is clearly to portray Anna's crisis of faith, surrounded by sinners and conversing with a child killer when she herself is trying to get pregnant. Just as the desperate and vulnerable prisoners place their own redemption in Anna's capable religious hands, so she then turns to Kate for answers when her faith in God and medicine founders. Olesen portrays the different relationships between women very skilfully, from the bitchy, tribal atmosphere between inmates in the prison kitchen, to the soft friendship between Anna and Kate which soon turns sour.
Scrubbers this ain't, fortunately for us all, but whilst examining a priest's moral crisis Olesen doesn't neglect those of her prisoners. On admittance Kate is asked for four contact telephone numbers, she can just about think of one. Inmate Jossi gets a visit from her mother and her children, only interested in the drugs her mother is couriering which she ferrets between her legs as her children watch. Child killer Kate is a broken woman tortured by her past and 'gift', which whilst she uses to heal also makes her morally suspect.
Looming large through much of the film's scenes set in the prison chapel is a huge Christ on the cross, and religion shouldn't be left out of this analysis. "They are so wretched and they think a magic wand will solve their problems," Anna says of the prisoners to her husband. As a priest Anna struggles with the idea that the women would rather look to a healer than God for help, but Olesen isn't looking to demonise religion. It acts as a catalyst for Anna's emotional crisis and to diametrically oppose knowledge as a basis for action rather than faith or trust.
Whilst Anna is a priest she is in plain clothes, she is attractive, with an open and friendly demeanour and enjoys a good sex life with her husband. She is therefore not difficult to relate to, and Ann Eleonora Jørgensen plays her as a likeable and strong character. Her descent then almost into madness as she deliberates what to do with her possibly handicapped foetus, that her faith cannot cure but the sinning hands of Kate could, is all the more real and disturbing.
Writer Kim Fupz Aakeson has said that he and Olesen set out to make a "feel bad movie", a serious tragedy that they would have to work harder to make appealing than a more easily accessible comedy. Olesen says they were looking at "the laws of society as opposed to those of ethics and faith, guilt, shame, loneliness and crimes . those who can be punished by the laws of society and those that cannot". In a very religious sense In Your Hands is also about temptation and making a choice between what you want and what you know is right.
None of these good versus bad moral questions are anything new in cinema, but that Olesen and Aakeson chose the environment of a women's prison to seriously and intelligently look at what kind of pressures face women, who from priests to inmates are occupying traditionally male movie roles, is both original and stimulating.
Rebecca Kemp
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