A ‘revelatory’ work in more ways than one, Dogme 95’s first official entry sees Vinterberg masterfully throwing us into the deep end of dark secrets and hard truths, as a reunion of family and friends celebrating the 60th birthday of a patriarch turns into a moral catastrophe.
Review #3,060
Dir. Thomas Vinterberg
1998 | Denmark | Drama | 105min | 1.33:1 | Danish, German & English
Not rated – likely to be R21 for strong sexual content and language, including references to sexual abuse
Cast: Ulrich Thomsen, Henning Moritzen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Paprika Steen, Birthe Neumann
Plot: The family of a wealthy businessman gathers to celebrate his 60th birthday. During the course of the party, his eldest son presents a speech that reveals a devastating secret that turns the night into a battle of truth and denial.
Awards: Won Jury Prize (Cannes)
International Sales: The Match Factory
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Mature – Secrets & Lies; Dysfunctional Family
Narrative Style: Straightforward
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: Arthouse
Viewed: Criterion Blu-ray
Spoilers: No
Fun fact: my programming team highly considered this for the 2010 edition of the student-run Perspectives Film Festival. That year’s theme was “Reality vs. Fiction”; alas, the sales agent never replied, and we had to discard the idea.
A milestone film from a milestone, if short-lived, movement, The Celebration remains the most well-known (and first official) entry of Dogme 95.
I won’t burden you with the movement’s draconian, anti-bourgeois rules of filmmaking, one that was curiously obsessed with an elusive cinematic purity, but at least in Thomas Vinterberg’s hands, we get a masterful demonstration of what such filmmaking could achieve.
Its opening moments are already revealing: a low-resolution wide shot of a man walking down a road, speaking on the phone. It is a stripped-down digital video image—if this was meant to represent cinematic purity, I remain unconvinced.
Yet this handheld, shoddily shot work evolves into one of the most compelling dramas about the hard, hidden truths of a family. The moral of the story: the ‘tradition’ of engaged storytelling and rich characterisation can triumph over any experimentation with form or aesthetics.
“This family is kaput!”
Dozens gather at a mansion to celebrate the 60th birthday of a respected business leader and family patriarch. If Jaws (1975) scared audiences the shit out of the murky waters, The Celebration will traumatise anyone who’s ever endured an awkward family reunion (or reassure them that it could always be worse).
Shocking in its blasé-ness, Vinterberg’s film poses a pertinent question: how does truth function within a private arena of secrets and lies? The overt and the covert intertwine in tantalising ways as revelations, deceptions, false niceties, blatant racism—and in the film’s most unexpectedly beautiful scene—the omnipresent, become fault lines triggering an earthquake-sized implosion.
I now understand why this had to be a Dogme film: imagined purity can only emerge through impurity, subjected to the raw, ‘unfiltered’ process of filmmaking.
It’s interesting to note that just two years later, Wong Kar-Wai made the landmark and similarly ‘experimental’ In the Mood for Love (2000), which also deals with, shall we say, the rules of respectability in light of impurities, only that it is the direct antithesis of a Dogme film in form and aesthetics. I’d say a double-bill screening ought to be on the cards.
Grade: A
Trailer:
Eternality Tan 