Go ahead, pick a label

MORE by a quirk of distribution than by design, Danish writer and director Anders Thomas Jensen currently has three films traversing the art house circuit. “Adam’s Apples,” which he wrote and directed, is a deadpan comedy, while “After the Wedding,” which he wrote, is a deadly serious family drama, and “Red Road,” for which he conceived the characters, is an electric mood piece.

This moment provides an inadvertent survey of the broad palette of tones and genres Jensen boldly claims as his own as he moves swiftly and easily among projects. Art house audiences aren’t the only ones taking notice, either. “After the Wedding” was nominated this year for an Academy Award for best foreign language film, and in 1999 Jensen won an Oscar for a best live action short film. Remake rights to a number of his scripts have been sold to Hollywood studios.

Deciding whether a given script will be for himself or another director isn’t difficult, Jensen says. “When you sit and write something, you just know it. There is a certain thread through the three movies I did, that I used to say was because nobody else wanted to do them because they are very dark comedies. It’s more like a gut feeling -- I’ll just feel this could be fun.”

In trying to describe “Adam’s Apples” -- which opened Friday, as did “Red Road -- it is important to keep in mind that the film is ostensibly a comedy. Mostly. A neo-Nazi (Ulrich Thomsen) is sent to something of a halfway house in the country, where the pastor in charge (Mads Mikkelsen) assigns him to tend to a lone apple tree. It is subsequently attacked by crows, infested with maggots and struck by lightning. Philosophies are challenged and souls are saved. And it’s funny.

But Jensen’s bruising and naturalistic scripts for other directors are like a splash of cold water to the face. Take the three films he has written for director Susanne Bier. “Open Hearts” is a romantic drama that grapples with personal ethics. “Brothers,” one of the most bracing films to tackle the post-9/11 world, is a powerful examination of war’s toll on the home front, and “After the Wedding” looks at nothing less than how we derive meaning from our lives and define ourselves. Heavy stuff.

Jensen’s own films, on the other hand, exist in an idiosyncratic universe of irony and fable, a strange land that bears only a passing resemblance to our world. “Flickering Lights,” Jensen’s first feature as a director, was an offbeat gangster comedy. “The Green Butchers” told a story about a smalltown butcher who had to resort to murder and cannibalism to keep his business running. In a hilarious running gag in “Adam’s Apples,” the pastor and the neo-Nazi listen to a treacly rendition of the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love” as a signpost of the ongoing growth and understanding between them.

Asked to elaborate on what connects Jensen’s three films as director, Mikkelsen succinctly responds, “Me.”

He is only half-joking, perhaps, as Mikkelsen has, in fact, appeared in all of those films as well as two of the Jensen-scripted Bier films. Actors Thomsen, Nicolas Bro and Nikolaj Lie Kaas also form something of a stock company, appearing repeatedly in Jensen’s movies. Mikkelsen in particular has been a familiar face to viewers of foreign fare over the last few years, and he is now known to a broader international audience thanks to his role as the villain in the most recent James Bond adventure, “Casino Royale.”

Following up with a more serious response, Mikkelsen says a Jensen script tells him all he needs to know about whether Jensen will direct. “The more absurd it is, the more crazy it is, it’s definitely something he’s going to do himself,” Mikkelsen says. “He always listens to his director and tries to aim for that. He’s got an understanding of what other people are trying to achieve, but his own stuff is always over-the-top. He can tell stories that are so much larger than life in his universe, that’s what he likes.”

Jensen says he and Bier worked on the story for “After the Wedding” during a monthlong trip to Italy. He thought of the film as a comedy until Bier pointed out that the idea would be better served as a drama. “Some of the scenes I write, these really hard scenes, I don’t know if I would be comfortable directing them,” says Jensen. “I think at this point now other directors can do it better than me. I know I should try something new, but I feel comfortable in this universe.”

Jensen likes to populate his films with killers, criminals and madmen as a way of stacking the deck against audience expectations. “I like nasty characters,” he says. “I like to portray people that you really aren’t supposed to like, and to get people to like them. I like that challenge, in the first 10 minutes make everybody want to leave the cinema and then at the end make people still care for the characters. I don’t think about it, but I can see from the films I choose for myself they have this common feature.”

Questions regarding the meaning of his work mostly just garner a sheepish “I don’t really think about it” from Jensen. If the filmmaker is reluctant to examine too fully the deeper currents of a film like “Adam’s Apples,” among other things a comic recasting of the Book of Job, Mikkelsen says that’s just part of Jensen’s overall sensibility, and his uncanny ability to perform surprising sleight of hand in blending the light with the dark.

“Generally he’s working with these absurd things,” says Mikkelsen, “he takes a taboo and he makes these frames within frames. In a darker film we wouldn’t be able to get away with it, you couldn’t tell that story about good and evil in a classical drama. In these films we can get away with it.”