Film: Festen (The Celebration)
Director: Thomas Vinterberg
Distributors: Nimbus Film, Denmark
Reviewer: Jonathan Ledgard

There are moments in Festen (The Celebration), when all that has been simply disintegrates. Nothing can ever be the same again. Paternal loyalties fall away, and truth turns in new and unsettling directions. Directed by a young Danish director, Thomas Vinterberg, the film is an extraordinary depiction of a night of family truth telling.

It is summertime, hot and yellow in the Danish countryside, and the extended Klingenfeldt clan gather to honour the sixtieth birthday of the family patriarch, Helge, at his elegant country house hotel. They have barely begun to enjoy the evening banquet when Helge's eldest son, Christian, is invited to make a toast and reveals that his father is in fact a paedophile, whose relentless sexual abuse of Christian and his twin sister as children drove her to suicide and him to despair.

Festen is a deeply disturbing film. It also looks and feels very different. The camera work is jittery and grainy. The sound is stripped of any musical score. It was shot for little money, on videotape, in Danish, with a cast unrecognisable outside Scandinavia, yet it is so compelling that when Helge blurts out his admission over brandy, that he raped the twins because that was all they were good for, it feels like a punch. Actions here have consequences that ripple out, seemingly forever. After watching the film, critics have noted, audiences often sit in silence stunned at the emotional violence of it all.

Although Festen received considerable acclaim, including the 1998 Prix De Jury in Cannes, Thomas Vinterberg's name appeared nowhere on the credits. That, along with the film's distinctive look, was a stipulation of Dogma rules. In 1995, Lars Von Trier, the acclaimed Danish director of Breaking The Waves, had an idea for this new style of film making. He called up his friend, Mr Vinterberg, and the two of them drew up a list of how a film should be made. "It was easy," Mr Vinterberg admitted, "we just listed all the things we hated about modern cinema."[1] A so-called vow of chastity was drawn up to which all Dogma films had to comply with. There were to be no genre movies, no superficial action, no flashbacks, no added lighting, no props brought in, no make-up, no camera filters, no added sound. Directors would receive no credit. Most importantly, the entire film would be shot with a handheld camera.

Dogma was a cinematic rescue operation, Mr Vinterberg said. "We wanted to purge film so that once again the inner lives of the characters justified the plot." Dogma films make no presumption of what an audience will like. The audience itself, Mr Vinterberg pointed out, does not know what it wants. The entire philosophy brings to mind a comment Aki Kaurismaki, the great Finnish film director, once made. "If you tune a film down to a minimalist level," he said, "the striking of a match is drama." Dogma offers fiscal hope for a more diverse and independent cinema. Instead of expensive pyrotechnics and special effects, a Dogma production needs only a video camera, a cast, and a script. But it is risky. To succeed at all a Dogma film has to be exquisitely crafted.

The many are no more justified in silencing the one, John Stuart Mill reminded us, than the one is in silencing the many. The justice meted out in Festen by Christian's clumsy, courageous revelation, is brutal. Helge is destroyed as a father and a grandfather; his wife is revealed as a betrayer of her own children, a hypocrite who covered up his crimes. You shall know the truth, the Bible says, and the truth shall set you free. For Christian, the surviving victim, a burden is lifted. His sister appears to him in a dream. Shall I come with you, he asks her, perhaps offering suicide. No, she replies, smiling.

Were justice "to shed its light upon men," Bahá'u'lláh tells us, "the face of the earth would be completely transformed." In topographical terms, perhaps, we can see injustice as a flooding sea, a watery deep of lies, greed, fear, and the abuse of power. Drained of injustice, the face of the "just" earth is a flatly lit sea-floor, an unpleasant and alien place, studded with skeletal shipwrecks, cruelly exposed, but not, we hope, too salty for a fresh blanket of meadows and nature's rebirth. The extended Klingenfeldt family, gathering for breakfast the next morning, seem both broken and freed by Helge's terrible admission. Exhausted, disorientated and scared, they tread the floor of their own freshly drained sea.