Change Your Image
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Reviews
Festen (1998)
Reality TV? Reality Check!
If only one film could be used to argue that courageous and innovative film-making could be used in the service of electrifying and spellbinding entertainment, Celebration would do the trick. Thomas Vinterberg's heinously underhyped film engages in the usual paradox of the Dogme film: that is, by using hand-held cameras, producing sound and picture together, eschewing studio lighting, costuming, music, and in many other ways attempting to strip away the apparatus of artificiality that purportedly stands between a film and its audience, the Dogme films in fact call attention to their own filmic-ness, simply by being outside the parameters that our eyes and ears have been accustomed to translating into a sense of naturalness. No matter how much a Dogme film may actually be akin to the way in which we perceive and experience the immediate physical world, it is the Hollywood style of picture that we are accustomed to process as reality. Certainly Dogme is not the only movement in any medium to have confronted the fact that in art, naturalism is achieved through artifice, while nature reads as artificial. But while the visual presentation of Celebration emphasizes precisely that awareness of the camera it attempts (or pretends to attempt) to negate, this is not what we generally understand as an art film.
In a sense, the continuum along which we measure narrative or feature films and experimental or art films is like the continuum on which we situate contemporary fiction and poetry. Both call into play a means (picture and sound, or language) and an end (story, content, argument). Narrative films and fiction tend to employ the means to the end, as is conventional; experimental film or contemporary poetry tend to emphasize the means over the end, or to place the means in the limelight with the end. Naturally, as on any good continuum, there is a middle area where intersection occurs. In Celebration, however, it is the audience who, as a result of its training, emphasizes the means and pays attention to the camera work and other details of the production which the director believes or claims to believe are invisible, or indistinguishable from reality, the lived experience. Celebration gives the story all the attention it deserves, and the plot is the stuff of the most satisfying melodrama.
Two twins, one dead by her own hand with rumors of unspeakabilities. A fetching and honest maidservant. A drunken and outrageous brother. A shocking interracial affair! An enduring upstairs-downstairs friendship. Mysterious signs scribbled on the wall, allegations of scandal, rough fondlings, physical violence of every ilk, and the very best wine flowing freely. If it weren't for the extraordinary sensitivity of the actors and their reluctance to roughhouse their parts (which no doubt arises in part from the characters' own reluctance to come to grips with an increasingly unavoidable truth), this would be soap opera at its lurid best. Ulrich Thomsen in the lead role as Christian is stupendous: befuddledly determined, shyly grim, politely and stiffly the right arm of vengeance. Paprika Steen as his sister Helene is another stand-out: weary, blowsy, smoking endless cigarettes with a particular suck-and-exhale technique that gives an instantaneous and tangible knowledge of the dry stickiness of her tongue and the roof of her mouth. She staggers between the moral extremes of hypocrisy and loyalty like a sloppy drunk. And Klaus Bondam, playing the toastmaster at the family reunion, is also impeccable as he doggedly and unthinkably continues with dignified mindlessness to plow through the conventions of the evening in the face of a total familial apocalypse.
Celebration, then, is the best kind of old-fashioned entertainment. The manner in which the film is produced may seem artificial in its departure from mainstream techniques, but it is paradoxical not only in the sense that in employing the techniques of naturalism it produces an effect of artificiality. The second paradox of Vinterberg's interpretation of the doctrine of Dogme lies in the fact that this sense of unnaturalness in no way excludes a simultaneous sense of shocking intimacy and immediacy. Close-ups of mouths and eyes twitching, fingers tapping, the quick sounds of glasses clicking and footsteps on dry dirt or leaves, the jolts and trembles of the cameras in the hands of the actors: all these combine to give a dizzying and almost sickening sense of being trapped inside the film, something almost akin to the IMAX experience from which this, at any technical level, could not be more removed.
These techniques have parallels in more mainstream cinema, of course. The Blair Witch Project is one example. But while that film was understood to be reality and unmasked as fiction, Celebration is exactly the reverse: the real wolf in sheep's clothing.
Tuvalu (1999)
Fail Better.
When some movies fail, it's boring. When some movies fail, it's hilarious. When some movies fail, it's grimly satisfying. Tuvalu is a movie that only just fails, and it's almost agonizing how close it comes to wonderousness.
Like the British film Hotel Splendide, Tuvalu is an atmospheric fantasy, the central character of which is a building populated by a supporting cast of whimsical caricatures, mostly Adorable but occasionally Evil. Both films are melancholy and eccentric, and both draw widely on an aesthetic of detritus, on the cobbled-together and the half-broken, on jumping, jerking, smoking, gurgling machines insecurely constructed of loose bolts and clanking valves. And both employ the same central motifs water and the state of being marooned. In Hotel Splendide, hydrophobia maroons the young and Adorable Stanley Smith (Hugh O'Conor) on the damp and dreary island where the run-down health spa Hotel Splendide has settled its grey, ungainly (once-majestic, once-romantic) bulk. Will the pert and rather noisy Kath (Toni Collette), who arrives to fill the position of cook, be able to save him? In Tuvalu, the boyish and (sort of) Adorable Anton (Denis Lavant) is marooned in the immense, run-down (once-majestic, once-romantic) building where the murky community swimming pool is housed, restrained from leaving perhaps by a fear of the outside world or possibly by a fear of lace-up shoes. Will the pert and (way too) Adorable Eva (Chulpan Khamatova), who comes with her father to swim at the pool, and who becomes Anton's enemy but also his beloved, be able to save him?
Tuvalu has much, much, much to recommend it. The stylized and pointed avoidance of dialogue is a bit precious, but director Veit Helmer carries it off only just. The complicated and baroque malfunctions of the architecture and its plumbing are ingenious, and the machinations of Anton and various pool patrons and other characters to save the building from demolition by masking its various deficiencies with complicated tricks and childish cosmetic alterations are winning, but the gleeful scene in which the complex conspiracy to deceive the building inspector takes place is somewhat over-choreographed, too delightful somehow, too ready to morph into a Broadway musical, with the scurrying up and down stairs, the popping in and out of heads from behind shower stall doors, the rapid cross-signaling and mis-signaling via the tapping of pipes. The scenes of the decrepit patrons paddling in the pool are languorous, luscious, balletic, but the quirks of the patrons themselves are too easy, too cartooned, and too familiar an old woman paddling herself in an inner tube with crutches, grungy, kindly sailors in tattered suits. Karl (Philippe Clay), the proprietor, the father of Anton and Anton's villainous brother Gregor (Terrence Gillespie), who is not only literally blind but blind as well to the disrepair and disuse into which the pool has fallen, is a marvelous figure dictatorial, terrifying but beloved, and artificially inflated but his eventual death is artificially inflated too, into a cumbersome and top-heavy symbol of brotherly rivalry and paternal betrayal.
Helmer has been successful in creating an entire, intact world, and any film with this to its credit deserves to be seen. The particular offerings by which patrons can gain admission to the pool, the particular method Eva and Anton use to spy on each other's dreams, the incredibly thorough and cohesive design of both the aesthetics of the building and the functioning of its many complex parts: elements like these imply an entire civilization, an alternate world with its own social structure, physical laws, and geography, of which the village we see in the film is only a small part. The implication of this other reality, which is like ours but is not quite ours, is gracefully and cunningly accomplished. This is a work of real imagination. And to criticize Helmer for his caricaturing of his characters is not quite fair, as this is precisely his objective. But the technique of caricature, of reducing and simplifying human beings, is only productive if, by eliminating or distorting finer shades of meaning, other meanings are revealed. In Tuvalu, the stylization is so affected, rather than effective. Gillespie turns in a terrifically energetic and clownish performance as the grasping and psychotic Gregor, but if he waxes hysterical and strains at the limits of tolerability only in order to emphasize the evils of avarice and the soullessness of progress tired themes, indeed then have his efforts really been worthwhile? Khamatova squeaks and goggles and pouts and puckers for all she's worth, but her role in the film is entirely limited to a plot device. Certainly her actions are absolutely intrinsic to the events that unfold, but the personality of her character is utterly self-serving. She could have played the role like a wooden mannequin, or like a sad-eyed siren, or like a histrionic heroine, and the film would have continued apace. She is a machine for moving plot, her robotic heart disguised beneath a sickly-sweet frosting of giggles and winks, and in this and other aspects of Tuvalu, Helmer does not merely play with superficiality, but is superficial.
Superficiality, yes, but a hell of a set designer. And this would be a wonderful movie for children whose parents don't object to a bit of nudity, a blow-up sex doll, and a couple of murders. Making a double feature out of this film and Hotel Splendide would assuredly cast each film in a more interesting light than viewing either independently. Still, even on its own merits alone, Tuvalu is one of the world's best failures.
De fem benspænd (2003)
Quintuple the Pleasure, Quintuple the Fun!
Jorgen Leth and Lars von Trier's Five Obstructions is, in a certain sense, collaboration as confrontation. The restrictions von Trier places on Leth are designed to frustrate the latter's inclination to distance, stylization, and abstraction (tendencies antithetical to the naturalism, spontaneity, and transparency of the Dogme school), and at least one restriction ("complete freedom") is explicitly intended as punishment for Leth's too-loose interpretation of a previous directive. Belying this atmosphere of conspiratorial coercion is the documentary footage of the meetings between the two directors, where their interaction is friendly and warm, not to say giddy. But other footage of Leth when von Trier is absent shows the elder director as bleak, almost stunned. In this game of flip-flopping submission and dominance, von Trier insists that Leth lower his guard (or his standards) and produce the kind of work von Trier repeatedly describes as "crap." Von Trier's not interested in art, but in therapy, as he reveals in the banal Obstruction #5, in which black-and-white documentary footage of the making of the previous four Obstructions are set as an illustrative montage to the sound of Leth's voice reading a letter to him written by von Trier, which exposes with crude and merciless sentimentality Leth's struggle with depression and von Trier's crusade to save him through the making of this film. Von Trier's mission would appear to be self-defeating, inasmuch as the brilliant flashes of ecstatic engagement that Leth displays throughout the documentary footage all occur when he has, despite von Trier's traps, continued to produce the gorgeous and intelligent cinema for which he is renowned (most notably in the very first and very best Obstruction, filmed in Cuba, which must answer the questions posed by the narrator of the original Perfect Human film, and which must contain no edit longer than twelve frames). Perhaps Leth's grimmest moment comes after he's screened his fourth Obstruction, a cartoon, for von Trier, who praises it slyly as representing the best of the best in the MTV style. Leth is clearly devastated, and we sense that he may have reconsidered his original comparison of himself with Faust and von Trier with Mephistopheles Faust, after all, did make a more or less fair exchange of his immortal soul for knowledge, while Leth has traded his own soul in order to be made a fool. While von Trier is right in saying at the outset, however, that none of the Obstructions will rival the original Perfect Human for either perfection or humanity, the collaboration yields some incredible results, not least of which is the documentation of the creative process itself. In the end, both von Trier's cruelty and his sentimentality seem suspect, and the documentary footage suddenly leaps into focus when we remember the way in which Dogme films often seem to wear the costume of the documentary or home movie. It's no fair asking to what extent the antagonism in von Trier and Leth's collaboration is actually a collusion between the directors. Regardless of how much of this film plays by Dogme's rules, however, nearly all the remakes shed a stunning illumination on the original Perfect Human and are themselves a delight.