Love Constructs in The One and Only by Susanne Bier

SUSANNE BIER’S GENDER PLAYS LOVE CONSTRUCTS IN THE ONE AND ONLY

by René Hirsch

Original title Director Scenario Actors

Den eneste ene (The One and Only, 1999) Susanne Bier Kim Fupz Aakeson, Susanne Bier Sidse Babett Knudsen (Sus), Niels Olsen (Niller), Søs Egelind (Lizzie), Paprika Steen (Stella), Rafael Edholm (Sonny), Sofie Gråbøl (Mulle), Vanessa Gouri (Mgala)

This series of articles studies the way Danish director Susanne Bier uses her thematic material to convey the roles she attributes to genders. In The One and Only, besides the author’s typical treatment of thematic material such as furniture and kitchen motivated by the male characters, the variation on names is used to reveal how female characters conceptualize love.

Scenario and characters

This romantic comedy stages two couples with fertility problems. Centered on Sus and Niller, the characters responsible for their couple’s problem, the film can be divided in 3 parts.

1st part: distribution

The two couples and their support-characters are introduced in parallel scenes.

Niller + Lizzie Sus + Sonny Knud

Stella

Mulle To protect her body from the marks of pregnancy, Sus gives her husband, Sonny, false indications as to when her fertile periods are.

Niller’s sperm being absolutely worthless, Lizzie and Niller decide to adopt a child.

2nd part: separation

At last pregnant, Sus discovers that Sonny has an affair. She throws him out of her house.

The day their adopted daughter, Mgala, arrives, Lizzie is knocked down by a car and dies.

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Stella and Knud happen to move in with their friend, and the characters are now divided into a male and a female household. Each household is endowed with a child: Mgala in the first one, the baby carried by Sus in the other.

Niller + Knud

Sus + Stella

Mgala

Baby

Being on her own, Sus decides to have an abortion, whereas the employee of the adoption office requests that Mgala returns to Burkina Faso, now that Lizzie is dead.

3rd part: redistribution

Niller meets Sus as he delivers the kitchen she has ordered: it’s love at first sight. Niller decides to keep Mgala, and convinces Sus to keep her baby and to marry him.

The new distribution of the characters gives rise to a new family unit with 2 children, and to two potential couples: Niller + Sus Mgala + baby Knud + Stella Mulle + priest

The kitchen in all its states

Characteristic of Susanne Bier's work is the way she uses material elements to symbolize a context without resorting to words. In particular, furniture and kitchen respectively represent the couple and the household, the family nucleus.

While furniture is a core material element in Open Hearts (Elsker dig for evigt, 2002), it briefly appears in The One and Only, when Sonny takes his furniture back, marking this way a definitive break with his wife.

References to the kitchen, on the contrary, abound in the film, primarily because Lizzie, Niller and Knud all work for a company selling and installing kitchens. Although it provides a comic element throughout the film, the kitchen as a symbol of the household only appears when Sus, engaged in a discussion with Sonny, wants to open the door of a cupboard: the door comes off its hinges and stays hanging in her hand. From this moment on, the kitchen will play a symbolic role when associated to Sus.

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•

"I hate this kitchen,” declares Sus. She goes on, saying that they would have changed their kitchen, were they not to move to Milan. Sonny announces that they are not going to Milan anymore, the post being given to someone else. They will thus have a new kitchen

•

Sonny takes Sus to a kitchen showroom. They quarrel. Sonny accuses her of having lied to him over her fertile periods. Sus finally agrees to have a child. Sonny is happy

•

Sus and Sonny are looking at a kitchen catalogue (with Lizzie). Sus goes for a red kitchen

•

Niller delivers the kitchen that Sus has ordered, and begins to dismantle the old one. An immediate complicity arises between them

•

Now alone, Sus cannot pay the installment on the kitchen. Niller proposes to install her kitchen for free. They kiss

•

The following day, Sus and Niller make love in the yet unpacked kitchen

The different states of Sus’ household mirror those of the kitchen: •

The cupboard falls apart, which reflects the situation between Sus and Sonny and preludes to their separation

•

Sus wants a new kitchen, thus a change in her life, and it’s in the kitchen showroom that Sus decides to have a baby. The couple is becoming a family and the new kitchen symbolizes it

•

Niller brings the new kitchen and dismantles the old one, when the couple Sonny-Sus breaks up. After their separation, Sus has no kitchen: the old kitchen, representing the couple Sus-Sonny, does not exist anymore, while the new one, still unpacked, stands for a relationship that does not yet exist, that is waiting to be revealed

•

When he decides to install the kitchen for free, Niller personally intervenes in the life of Sus. It is at this moment that their relationship is set in motion, that they exchange their first kiss

•

With the new kitchen, love re-appears in the life of Sus. This allows her to start a family, and consequently, to accept the child she carries

The two men playing a role in Sus’ life determine the action: Sonny by cheating on her and by definitely breaking up with her; Niller, when he personally intervenes in her life, and when he obliges her to confront a new love reality. The fact that Sus, on the other hand, reacts passively to the events, can be explained by the way her love life is governed.

Names and the idealization of love

The variations on the name of some of the characters represent a very specific aspect of The One and Only. Besides its primary comic effect, changing or manipulating one’s name indicates the refusal of an existing

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identity and the desire to project another one.

These identity deviations are exclusively in the realm of the 3 main female characters, each in her own way, each with her own purpose.

Mulle

Right from her first appearance, we know that Mulle is in love with Niller.

But it’s only after the death of her sister that she asks Niller to call her Merete. She doesn’t give any explanation for this, but corrects Niller every time he forgets. Under the name of Merete, Mulle is actively involved with the lives of Niller and Mgala, clearly expressing her desire to form a family with them. But when Niller admits that he has met another woman, she realizes that she must abandon the project to take the family of her sister over. She forbids Niller to call her Merete, refuses to let another woman make use of the furniture of her sister, and announces that Niller will not be able to keep Mgala.

Sus

The first scene of the movie emphasizes at once the double confusion regarding the name of Sus’ husband: first of all, Andrea is a female name in Denmark; secondly, his name is Andrea, but Sus calls him Sonny. Later on, Sus will explain to Niller that she had a boyfriend who was called Sonny.

Her following boyfriend was called Johnny, but the first time they made love, she called him 'Sonny'. Then, she met Andrea. When they made love, she called him 'Sonny' as well. It was thus Sonny, Sonny, and Sonny, she explains, laughing.

By giving the name of her first love to her other lovers, Sus amalgamates the three men: the latest one, the one she married, is just another Sonny.

Finally, she realizes that Sonny-Andrea, in spite of his beauty and his Italian charm, is not the man she wants. In fact, none of her Sonnys has been the one, her quest for love having been guided by misconceptions and preconceived ideas.

When Stella hears that Sus has made love with Niller, she asks her if she has called him Sonny, checking if Niller is just another Sonny, or if he has a proper identity, if he is “the one and only”?

Stella

Identity confusion as the illustration of an inappropriate love quest is even more pronounced by Stella who is in no way interested in men as individuals (the scene in the bar), but who is completely obsessed with their names, trying to match them with hers. After coalescing multiple names, she eventually concludes that there could be something wrong with her first name.

Projected and relational love constructs

The love projections of the female characters are built on the negation of the other. For Sus, all the men in her life are the same man. It will need Niller’s perseverance to eventually make her open her eyes and accept a Tous droits réservés © rené hirsch 2012

new reality, a reality that she cannot control: "I once made a test in a magazine, to figure out what type I was… I was so afraid to be a type that couldn’t control my own life… so I cheated to get more points," she confesses at a very critical moment, lying on the abortion table.

Stella also does not take reality into account, fantasizing about the names she could get married to.

As for Mulle, totally blinded by her feelings for Niller, she cannot see that he does not share her ‘projected’ love: every kiss they exchange makes this discordance painfully clear.

That these love misconstructions are headed toward alienation is embodied in the existing couples: Lizzie-Niller, Sus-Sonny, Knud-Bettina will all break up. As conveyed by the three female characters, the root to these misfits resides in an unsuitable conception of love, a love that is absolute, that does not take the context, the reality of the other into account; a love in which the other has to fit a space that has already been defined, a space that has already been named.

Opposed to this vision of absolute love is the love between Sus en Niller: love at first sight, instantaneous love, a love for no reason that arises from the interaction between two individuals. The scene at the hospital, in which Sus has to choose between Sonny and Niller, represents the culminating point of this opposition. When Niller asks Sus if she is in love with him, Sus, first invisible, stretched out on the operating table, slowly emerges facing the camera, as if the question has prompted an awareness, a revelation.

Grasping the reality of the relationship Niller is offering, Sus accepts the idea that she is in love with him, that she could even feel love for him.

Relating her feelings to a real individual and not to a projected personage seems new, even strange to her.

Nothing of this magnitude for Stella, but her contact with Knud, at the end of the movie, seems to indicate a change in her approach: she asks him for his name only after a definite complicity has arisen between them. Finally, Mulle loosens up, dancing with the priest, forgetting the safeguards she had imposed on Niller.

Tribute to the family

But depicting the opposition between projected and relational love is not the only motive of the movie. After her sister’s death, Mulle as Merete suggests to Niller that they could form a beautiful family with Mgala, indicating that she wants to prolong the family project her sister had started. Later on, Sus admits to Stella: "Sonny and I and a child… happiness… but if I cannot have it all, I don’t want anything. I do not believe in 2/3 happiness." That’s why she decides to have an abortion: no man, no family, thus no reason to have a baby. As for Mgala, she has to return to Burkina Faso, now that Niller is alone.

Although this orthodox vision of the nuclear family is expressed by the female characters, its construct and its realization lay in the hands of the Tous droits réservés © rené hirsch 2012

male personage: Niller decides to keep Mgala and convinces Sus not to have an abortion by agreeing to become the father of her baby (2nd adoption). Under his impetus, the norms of the family triad are respected.

Moreover, the double adoption he instigates places the familial dogma within the framework of a moral code, and not of a phallus cult: "that’s a pretty good job with the quality of my sperm" concludes Niller.

The masculine revealing the feminine will be used again in Brothers (Brødre, 2004), and will find its full development in After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet, 2006), a true eulogy to the patriarchal foundation of the family.

René Hirsch May 2012 rene.hirsch@ymail.com

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