# Dogme 1 - Festen (1998)

### reviewed by
Scott Renshaw

THE CELEBRATION (FESTEN) (October) Starring: Ulrich Thomsen, Henning Moritzen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Paprika Steen, Birthe Neumann, Trine Dyrholm, Helle Dolleris, Gbatokai Dakinah. Screenplay: Thomas Vinterberg and Mogens Rukov. Producer: Birgitte Hald. Director: Thomas Vinterberg. MPAA Rating: Unrated (could be R for adult themes, nudity and profanity) Running Time: 101 minutes. In English and Danish with English subtitles. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

THE CELEBRATION's Klingenfeldt clan is one of those families that proves Tolstoy's assertion about unhappy families being unhappy in their own unique ways. More to the point, it's a family that makes you feel better about your own unhappy family. Eldest son Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) wallows in depression over his twin sister's recent death; brother Michael (Thomas Bo Larsen) is still in hot water over his alcohol-fueled scene at the last family gathering; sister Helene (Paprika Steen) creates a stir by bringing black boyfriend Gbatokai (Gbatokai Dakinah) to meet her less-than-politically correct relatives. Throwing these people together for a weekend on a country estate celebrating father Helge's (Henning Moritzen) 60th birthday would be enough to insure plenty of recrimination to go around.

That's the kind of character truth "Dogma '95" -- a manifesto for a return to bare bones filmmaking created by several leading Danish directors -- was supposed to engender. Yet at times THE CELEBRATION feels forced and artificial, merely in a different way than the forced and artifical genre films implicitly criticized by Dogma '95. The gathering in the story eventually comes to focus on the removal of a jurassic-sized skeleton from the family closet, and the reactions of all the family members to what has been revealed. Some of those reactions ring jarringly true, like Michael's attempt to return himself to his father's good graces by removing the cause of the trouble. Others feel silly, like the machinations of the family cook to help air the dirty laundry. But good or bad, all the reactions spring from a bombshell rather than the typical exchanges of small artillery that make for most family tension.

It all seems terribly unnecessary considering how perceptively Vinterberg and co-scripter Mogens Rukov capture the more mundane animosity and foolishness of family gatherings. When grandfather rises to tell the same slightly risque joke for the second time in the evening, all and sundry indulge him, chuckling and applauding just as merrily as the first. Michael treats his wife Mette (Helle Dolleris) with such a basic contempt that he leaves to walk a mile with the children when he picks up Christian in their small car. Helene's mother (Birthe Neumann) "mistakes" Gbatokai for Helene's previous boyfriend, a Latino, with a casual and oblivious racism. Vinterberg and his exceptional cast -- Thomas Bo Larsen is particularly good as the younger son overflowing with toxic anger -- find moments of greatness in these simple conflicts. They're the sort of things all families contend with, the things that make people want to take blood relations and make them bloody relations.

Indeed, Vinterberg's point may have been that the more extreme example of family crisis that supercedes the others is more common than we'd like to believe. If so, it still feels like an authenticity that draws too much attention to itself. Curiously, the same could be said for the rigid film-making prescriptions of the Dogma '95. The hand-held camerawork, washed-out video-to-film cinematography, location shooting and absence of underscore music were intended to subsume "auteurism" in favor of story, but they simply become an auteurism of a different sort. As effectively as the location serves to intensify the claustrophobia of a family forced to confront its demons, the look and sound of THE CELEBRATION -- or lack thereof -- just make you aware of how different this film looks and sounds than other films, exactly when the familiarity of the situations should come into focus.

Some might argue the same was true of the most notable previous Dogma '95 effort, Lars Von Trier's BREAKING THE WAVES. Yet in that film, the style supported the instability of the main character's world; thematically, the look was of a piece with the story. In THE CELEBRATION, that same look works far less effectively, because it feels like an exercise rather than a choice. When Vinterberg nails the truth of basic family interaction, it's easy to overlook that exercise. Later, when a dramatic plot point takes over, it starts to seem that too much has been imposed on these characters from without -- a bad dogma starts to run over all its great karma.

         On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 bad dogmas:  7.

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