Film: Festen
Director: Thomas Vinterberg
Country: Denmark
Released: May 1998
Runtime: 105 minutes
Genre: Drama
Studio: Nimbus Film
Influenced: Susanne Bier, Michael Haneke, Aki Kaurismäki, Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez
In 1995, Danish directors Thomas Vinterberg and Lars Von Trier concocted Dogme 95, a filmmaking movement intended to purify the art form by excluding technology and special effects. While Von Trier's Breaking The Waves (1996) shared some of these values, Vinterberg’s Festen was the first film to be truly created under these rules. Von Trier's Idioterne was released at the same time as Festen, another film fully in compliance with the Dogme 95 rules, and which also tested the boundaries of good taste. Defining Festen is no easy task, somewhere between bleak farce and family drama, and such is the assault on the senses as the events of the film unfold that audiences are left not knowing whether to laugh or cringe in disbelief. The film is set during a lavish family gathering to celebrate the 60th birthday of Helge (Henning Moritzen), the patriarch of a wealthy Danish family.
The central character is Christian (Ulrich Thomsen), Helge's eldest son, who decides to expose a dark family secret during the celebratory dinner. Christian's revelation involving the sexual abuse of himself and his twin sister, Linda, by their father, Helge, is truly shocking. Watching the film for the first time, I just couldn't believe how is it was possible for everyone to carry on with the meal as though nothing had happened? Psychologists have praised the work for the way it portrays the chronic denial often seen in incestuous families. “It takes more than that to shake them”, says Helge to his son when Christian then apparently disowns his accusation, but this is just a trick he's playing on his father. After they seem to resolve things, Christian fires another shot at his father, this time accusing him of being indirectly responsible for Linda's death. The film explores themes of denial, silence, family dynamics and the psychological and emotional toll of confronting painful truths within a deeply dysfunctional family.
Vinterberg shot the film using handheld video cameras and blew up the footage to 35mm. This makes for a grainy feel to the footage, while often our view of events is from a strange angle (sometimes from the floor, sometimes behind a door frame, etc). Jerky camera movements add to the disorienting experience, but the handheld approach does give a real sense of immediacy in certain scenes. As per Dogme rules, no artificial sounds were added in post-production, adding to the raw and unfiltered feel of movie, which is reflected in the subject matter. Over the course of the evening meal, we as the audience are confronted with sexual abuse revelations, racist songs initiated by Christian's deranged brother Michael (Thomas Bo Larsen), physical violence and suicide notes. Later in the evening, the mother Else (Birthe Neumann) makes a speech saying that Christian had an imaginary friend as a child and that he always had trouble distinguishing reality from fiction. She asks him to apologise for his accusations, but instead he accuses her of turning a blind eye to her husband’s paedophilia and of being a hypocrite.
Considering its relatively low budget, Festen enjoyed a good level of box office success both in Denmark and internationally, on the back of the critical acclaim and the many awards that it won. This included the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998, as well as a nomination for a Golden Globe Award in the category of Best Foreign Language Film in 1999. The film's critical acclaim played a crucial role in popularising the Dogme 95 movement and cementing its place in international cinema. In terms of legacy, the novel handheld camera approach was actually more influential in TV than cinema, notably for hit UK comedy shows like The Office (2001-03) and Peep Show (2003-15), but we can also see how it inspired the handheld horror genre, most obviously The Blair Witch Project (1999). Vinterberg resisted the label of black comedy for Festen, maintaining “it’s a drama and there are some laughs”, but its portrayal of how the thin veneer of respectability can mask dark secrets makes for devastating satire.
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