The Celebration (Festen)

If you tell someone the Celebration is your favorite movie and they have even an inkling of what the movie is about, they will think you are a disgusting human being. This happened to me about a month ago when I was rattling off my top movies: Mallrats, Terminator 2, lots of foreign films, the Celebration. The guy I was talking to nearly choked on his pad thai. But hey, at least its not Gummo.

The Celebration is about a patriarch's huge 60th birthday blowout. Set in Denmark's countryside (that's about as far as my geography knowledge will take me) the Celebration is a Dogme 95 film. You know Dogme 95. Dogme was an attempt by Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg et al. to create a new way of making films, stripped of artifice and the bloated Hollywood post-production process. Some of the goals were: no special lighting, genre films, superficial action...the director must not be credited. The idea, which I have taken from an interview of Mr. von Trier himself, was to limit yourself so severely (like the Sweats challenge!) that you grasped onto something brilliant as you were falling. Mr. von Trier is known as being a great filmmaker and a huge asshole. Dancer in the Dark and Breaking the Waves were good, so heartbreakingly brilliant, don't get me wrong. But Mr. von Trier runs his mouth criticizing the United States when he hasn't even been here! Like any good liberal, I can criticize the U.S. all I want but once a European follows suit, I become a Palin "real American." With us or against Mr. von Trier, with us or against us.

Alright, for awhile it seemed like Dogme was a success, as Dogme film #1, The Celebration, was the Grand Jury Prize winner at the Cannes film festival. Dogme has lost a lot of its credence because its attempt to forego gimmicks was a gimmick in itself. A collective of avant garde filmmakers! 10 goals like the 10 commandments! Content and form horribly misaligned. Nontheless, the Celebration is a Dogme film and it will forever be pegged as Dogme #1.

The movie is really good. Not because of its Dogma-ness (well, maybe in part) but because the story is so tight and it unravels both quickly and with supreme patience. Helge, the patriarch, is celebrating his 60th birthday at the family run hotel.

Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) makes an opening speech, saying that Helge used to rape him and his twin sister as children. The upper crust guests are appalled but laugh it off in a masterful move of collective deception. Christian is thrown out and the door is slammed. The guests go back to eating and Christian walks right back in. Because they didn't lock the door. It's just such a good moment, comedic in the face of tragedy. Christian makes another speech, in this one he accuses his mother of walking in when his father was raping him.

Amidst the accusations the waiters bring out another course. It's kinda like the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie; there is death and absurdity amidst the fine china and silverware. Vinterberg mixes the weighty accusation of incest with scenes of drunken laughter and dancing. Up until 3/4 of the movie the viewer thinks that maybe it is all Christian's imagination. Maybe Helge can still be the upstanding family man that the party wants him to be. And the audience maybe wants it, too. He's built this hotel empire; everyone has really kind words to say about him. His wife is unimpeachably elegant and gorgeous. But everyone knows that is not true. Towards the end of the movie, Helene, Christian's sister reads a note left by Linda, Christian's twin who recently committed suicide. She writes that she had dreams Dad was molesting her again and that was why she was taking her life. It is here that the party's goodwill ends. Helge has scarred his children and killed his daughter.

The next day at breakfast (yes, this was a destination party and everyone is present at BREAKFAST THE NEXT DAY AFTER THAT DEBACLE). Helge has fallen. His son, the bumbling baby of the family, Michael, refuses to allow his children to eat near their grandfather. No longer in his tux, Helge looks like a shrunken man. His life is over.

It takes two hours but Helge finally gets what he deserves. The disdain and disgust of his family and friends. No gimmicks. Just justice.

I Don't want to sleep alone (Hei Yan Quan)

I don't want to sleep alone is a cinematic masterpiece. Tsai Ming Liang is an amazingly patient director and this movie is a testament to his patience. Every scene is wonderfully drawn out. The protagonist peeing. A woman gazing. People sleeping. You know in High Fidelity when that guy asks John Cusack how his records are organized? Chronologically? Nope. Alphabetically? Nope. Then how? Autobiographically. Holy fuck!! That's kinda how I like to store movies in my mind. Autobiographically. I remember I watched I Don't want to sleep alone at the berkeley pacific film archive. Maybe it was an Asian film festival? The theater was really empty. The movie was art house as fuck and a few people walked out. I was with my friend, A. We often watched movies together and she was the perfect partner because she wouldn't dissect it afterwards but we were always on the same wavelength. We'd use really generic and normative phrases to describe the movie but it made sense because we understood, deeply, how we each felt.

The film is set in Kuala Lumpur and it took awhile for this to register because Chinese, Bangladeshi, Indian and Malay people populate the screen. It all starts with this abandoned mattress that is lugged and dragged across the city. This isn't like Danny Boyle's vision of poverty. This is a filthy, grimy and gritty city. Forgive the description (I saw the movie years ago... so I have these gaping holes in my memory)...A man drags the mattress to his apartment and scrubs and cleans it. He finds a badly beaten man on the street and scrubs and cleans him as well. They sleep together on the bed. They don't have sex but the sleeping and gazing is more really intimate, somehow. Oh god, I've forgotten nearly everything about the movie (what a great reviewer) except a few key scenes. The characters rarely speak. In fact, the main character never says a word and we never learn his name. Tsai utilizes gaze and feel much more than words. There's this incredible phantasmic fantasy with fishing and fireworks and an old decrepit warehouse?

Worst review ever. I'll admit it. I need to watch the movie again. Maybe it won't be as good this time around because I'm a hardened pragmatist now. But I loved it once. It was so beautiful.