Thomas Vinterberg's 1998 Dogme 95 film, I believe the first Dogme to be released, finally got a play on my DVD last night.
I knew a little about it - we watched ostensible lead character Christian's first dinner speech in film theory class a few years ago, and I saw Vinterberg's Its All About Love a couple of years later. Love was okay, but more of a curiosity than a totally successful film.
Festen is brilliant. It rattles along at a fair old pace and wastes no time in establishing the characters (or at least, who you think the characters are) before the first twist about 25 minutes in. From there, the tone of the film shifts into near-surreality, kept grounded by the gritty, grainy style (such were the constraints of Dogme) and the raw, uniformly excellent performances.
I won't tell you what the main story of the film is, but suffice to say that Christian understates it when he mentions "home truths". It is by turns bizarre, unsettling, funny, moving and never short of gripping.
Festen won the Grand Prix at Cannes in '98 and rightly so. It is the kind of edgy cinema we see so little of - so well done and so in your face, you struggle to keep up at times and know that this is the kind of film that should be made more often. It reminds you how little we actually settle for when it comes to anything beyond technical achievement in films.
Check it out. Its every bit as good as Von Trier's work of the same period, but I would say perhaps slightly easier to get into, if you can get passed the slightly rapid subtitles.
Over.
I knew a little about it - we watched ostensible lead character Christian's first dinner speech in film theory class a few years ago, and I saw Vinterberg's Its All About Love a couple of years later. Love was okay, but more of a curiosity than a totally successful film.
Festen is brilliant. It rattles along at a fair old pace and wastes no time in establishing the characters (or at least, who you think the characters are) before the first twist about 25 minutes in. From there, the tone of the film shifts into near-surreality, kept grounded by the gritty, grainy style (such were the constraints of Dogme) and the raw, uniformly excellent performances.
I won't tell you what the main story of the film is, but suffice to say that Christian understates it when he mentions "home truths". It is by turns bizarre, unsettling, funny, moving and never short of gripping.
Festen won the Grand Prix at Cannes in '98 and rightly so. It is the kind of edgy cinema we see so little of - so well done and so in your face, you struggle to keep up at times and know that this is the kind of film that should be made more often. It reminds you how little we actually settle for when it comes to anything beyond technical achievement in films.
Check it out. Its every bit as good as Von Trier's work of the same period, but I would say perhaps slightly easier to get into, if you can get passed the slightly rapid subtitles.
Over.
