When art house fans talk about the Dogme 95 manifesto, it’s mostly in reference to Lars von Trier. But fellow Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration (1998) was the first film ever produced under its strictures.
As co-author of the collective’s “Vow of Chastity”, Vinterberg led the avant-garde movement to strip filmmaking down to its most basic form. They shunned special effects and lighting, camera tricks, superfluous music, props, and avoided genre formats as well as geographic and temporal space manipulation (meaning no flashbacks, outer space fictions or historical settings).
Reducing filmmaking to such austerity wasn’t just a reaction against Hollywood fakery; they believed it would allow a project to delve more deeply into its truth and storytelling. The Cannes Film Festival clearly agreed, because the judges awarded Vinterberg’s work the 1998 Jury Prize. But in retrospect, the film is orthodoxy taken to a minimalist extreme.
The Celebration is a domestic chamber drama, but it resembles a gothic and absurd home movie. A gathering of family and friends arrive at a country inn to celebrate the 60th birthday of its owner (Henning Moritzen). But over dinner, eldest son Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) drops a major bomb by accusing his father of childhood sexual abuse, and says this is the reason for the recent suicide of his twin sister. From there, the candlelit formal dinner degenerates into drunken disorder and fist fights in the garden.
The revelation of ugly family skeletons is nothing new in the movies. From the start it is obvious the evening will not be pleasant. A hot-headed brother, Michael (Thomas Bo Larsen), dumps his wife and children on the side of the road. Sister Helene (Paprika Steen) invites her African-American boyfriend to the dinner, bringing latent racist sentiments out in the party guests.
The resentment of the property’s staff is slowly bubbling to the surface, too.
The anti-bourgeois satire is not short on verve and energy. Shot on cheap grainy video, The Celebration looks like a rough amateur film cut by Martin Scorsese.