by Jon Reinsch

The Celebration

Someone has died, and a gloomy young Dane returns from abroad to confront his dysfunctional family. He uses a big get-together to make his grievances known. Are we seeing another version of Hamlet? No, it's Thomas Vinterberg's new film The Celebration. Vinterberg is a founding member of a collective of Danish cinematic wildmen called "Dogme 95." These directors regard with disdain much of the technology in contemporary filmmaking. In response, they have taken a "vow of chastity", whereby they swear to adhere to a hand-held camera and natural lighting and sound. This primitivism sounds a little pretentious, so it's surprising that the results are so absorbing. This is a film to make you stare in open-mouthed amazement at the screen.

The "celebration" of the title is the 60th birthday party of the family patriarch. There are many guests, but we spend most of our time with three very different siblings. The tragic absence of their sister detracts from the festive character of the occasion. This mix of emotions leads to some extremely bizarre behavior.

There's an extraordinary sequence in which the action alternates between three different scenes taking place simultaneously in different parts of the house, as the newly arrived guests settle into their surroundings. Each scene involves two people, searching for something. There are jarring cuts from explosive action to dreamy quiescence, and vice versa.

The hand-held camera serves to keep the viewer constantly disoriented. This film stands at a certain distance from its characters, sometimes literally looking down at them. Vinterberg has a dark, biting, sense of humor. He seems to share some of the obsessions of fellow "Dogme 95" adherent Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves, The Kingdom), such as the supernatural, fraternal societies, and smug authoritarians getting their comeuppance.

When the dark secret is revealed for the first time, and the assembled guests sit paralyzed, their reaction is echoed in the theater. It's a deeply uncomfortable moment, like no other in recent memory. From that point onward, whenever someone rises and strikes a spoon against a glass to get the banqueters' attention, you stiffen in anticipation of another shock.

The Celebration is not the only recent film to mine the subject of dysfunctional families. If you're an actor, given your first chance to direct, where do you go for source material? Judging from Buffalo 66 and Nil by Mouth, you need look no further than your own family, taking the opportunity to exorcise the demons of your childhood. While you're at it, film a scene in your boyhood home, or dub in a recording of one of your parents singing a song. This is the audacious approach of both Vincent Gallo (Buffalo 66) and Gary Oldman (Nil by Mouth). While Gallo's effort has received plenty of well-deserved exposure, Oldman's (now available on video) has not.

Nil by Mouth is an undeniably challenging experience, especially for an American audience. Like Trainspotting, it's one of those films that would benefit from subtitles, even though the language spoken is nominally English. A more serious challenge is the film's bleakness. Oldman apparently grew up in an environment in which alcohol-intensified brutality was a constant occurrence. He creates a vision of South London as nightmarish as Scorsese's New York. This is a world from which the only escape - other than drugs - is symbolic, as when a child releases a balloon with her name on it.

Oldman first focuses attention on Billy, a junky who arouses empathy by his clueless suffering at the hands of psychotic predators. Then we move on to Valerie, wife of the ferociously abusive Ray. But in the final analysis it is Ray himself around whom the film revolves.

In marked contrast to Ray's behavior is that of several generations of women. In one case, a mother's love goes as far as driving her addicted son to get a fix. On the one hand, the tenacity these women show in the midst of despair is moving. At the same time, their tolerance of the monstrous Ray is almost as disturbing as the monster himself.

As in The Celebration, Oldman's cinematographer employs a hand-held camera throughout. Here, however, it is as if we are watching a documentary - one that brings us all too close to the characters. Together with the utterly convincing performances, this creates the impression that when the camera stops rolling, these people just go on tormenting each other.

The only false note is, unfortunately, the most optimistic one. When a character suddenly develops a tender, sensitive side, it seems to come out of nowhere. Still, without such a gesture toward hope, the preceding terrors would have been pointless. Miracles are the stuff of cinema. That Oldman fails to convince us is no disgrace; it would have taken an Ingmar Bergman to pull if off.