"Festen" (The Celebration) is the
first film to be officially released under the Dogme95 collective
banner, and while its not exactly the groundbreaking,
revolutionary type of film that's been hyped, its certainly
invigorating and good sign of things to come. Dogme95 is the
Danish school whose manifesto was drawn up in the Spring of that
year by Lars von Trier ("Breaking the Waves",
"Kingdom", "Zentropa") and contemporary
Thomas Vinterberg (two more directors, Christian Levring and
Soren Kragh-Jacobsen, have since taken the collective's vow), as
a means of attempting to force naturalism over dramaturgy in a
given production, a sort of hyper-structured cinema verite. The
manifesto contains a series of rules a collective member must
adhere to which state that shooting must be done on location with
no external props or set additions brought in, sound must never
be produced apart from the images or vice versa (music may be
used only if it occurs on location during filming), the camera
must be handheld, the film must be on 35mm color stock with no
artificial lighting or optical filters used whatsoever, and
perhaps most importantly that the director must not be credited,
among a few others (no genre pictures, no extraneous action,
etc.). The PR circuit has made it common knowledge that
Vinterberg helmed this production (the 2nd Dogme95 film will be
von Trier's "Idioterne" which premeired at Cannes but
has no US distributor as of yet), although true to the manifesto,
"The Celebration" opens with a placard displaying a
Dogme95 'Certificate of Authenticity' signed by all four members
and a title card which states "Dogme #1" (Vinterberg is
given credit for "idea" in the closing scroll, but
that's it). The opening scenes present a group of characters, all
related, converging on a large estate to celebrate the family
patriarch's 60th birthday.
It becomes rapidly apparent that the atmosphere
may not be as festive as intended when we learn of one family
member's recent death, the ghost of whom makes at least one
tangible appearance, and figuratively presides over the rest of
the film. After some expository character establishment, the
group converges for a lavish dinner. During the soup, the eldest
son gives an inflammatory toast angrily thanking his father for
several years of sexual abuse, and the guests (and audience)
realize that, like it or not, there's five more courses to go.
Needless to say, drinks are consumed, hostilities are unleashed,
and piles of skeletons come avalanching out of various closets.
Vinterberg isn't treading any new narrative ground here, but the
nature of Dogme95's demanding constraints gives the proceedings
tangible immediacy and real-time tension, while almost forcing
the actors into inhabiting their characters with naked intimacy
free of self-consciousness. And since the manifesto says nothing
about contributing a personal stylistic imprint, Vinterberg seems
to compensate for his rather thin material by exploiting all the
manifesto's rules with the limited means at his disposal.
Vertiginous, almost nauseating hand-held camera work,
hyper-kinetic editing and an unusual disregard for presenting
anything remotely pleasing in a visual sense contribute to the
increasingly dour narrative proceedings, and while it certainly
wasn't Vinterberg's intent, the manifesto's machinations
eventually garner more interest from the viewer than the vehicle
they're presenting. But, part of the nature of experiments is the
capacity for failure and further honing, and while this first
offering is a minor let-down, the visual results of the manifesto
are at times breathtaking and definitely worth seeing (Vinterberg
has, incidentally, posted an apologetic confession on the Dogme95
website explaining the rules he broke while filming: in one scene
the camera was tied to a hand-held boom pole making the camera
not technically hand-held, in another a desk had to be built
though it was built out of materials found on location), and it's
clear that as the collective finishes subsequent films other
members of the collective perhaps working with slightly more
fresh or rich material ("Idioterne"?) will offer a
variety of interesting interpretations and finished pieces. As it
is, "The Celebration" is a noble effort, and as such
deserves support.
