The Celebration

The jury's still out on Dogma 95--the slightly tongue-in-cheek "manifesto" signed by a quartet of Danish filmmakers, in which they pledge allegiance to natural lighting, diagetic sound (no music or voiceover, in other words), handheld photography, and various other just-keepin'-it-real techniques--but if subsequent Dogma productions are as riveting as this, the first to arrive in the U.S., it's gonna be rather hard to argue with aesthetic success. Granted, the story cooked up by director Thomas Vinterberg, in which a grown son toasts his aging, highly respected father on the occasion of the old man's birthday by announcing to all assembled that dear old Dad had molested both the son and his late sister when they were kids, would likely be effective no matter how it was shot. But it's hard to deny that the aggressive cutting and lurching camera movements give the film an urgency and immediacy that dovetail nicely with the characters' hair-trigger emotions; scenes like the one in which another sister searches her bathroom for a message from her deceased sibling are heightened by the restless, borderline incoherent motion of the frame. (Neither the actors nor the camera operator knew where the message was hidden--another Dogma truth-telling strategy that pays off.) Next up is Lars von Trier's controversial The Idiots; stay tuned to see if that experiment, like this one, comes highly recommended. (M. D'Angelo)