Thomas Vinterberg (1998)
This famous film was the first Dogme 95 movie and, according to the documentary Side by Side, the first feature to be shot using digital cameras. The setting is a family-owned hotel in the Danish countryside. The occasion is a sixtieth birthday dinner – ‘festen’ means ‘a celebration’ – for the paterfamilias, Helge Klingenfeldt-Hansen. The dinner is to be punctuated by speeches and the guests have hardly finished their soup when Helge’s son Christian gets to his feet and offers his father a choice between a speech written on green paper and one written on yellow. Helge opts for green and this turns out to be what Christian calls ‘a home truths’ speech. (It’s never explained whether the father, in making this choice, literally asked for it – whether there really was an innocuous yellow alternative or whether Christian had the same script on both pieces of paper.) The subject of the speech is ‘father’s bath-time’ routine. Christian tells the gathering how, when he and his twin sister Linda were children, Helge, before he took a bath, would sexually abuse them both. Linda is not there to speak for herself: she recently committed suicide. As the evening progresses, Christian makes two further speeches. In the first, he condemns his father as the murderer of his sister. In the second, a response to his mother’s speech in which she asks Christian to apologise for his two earlier contributions, he brands her a hypocrite for ignoring the evidence of her own eyes when, on one occasion, she caught her husband in the act of molesting Christian.
Some reviews of Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt in 2012, which also revolves around allegations of child abuse, drew a sharp distinction between this film and Festen: whereas it’s clear from the start of The Hunt that the accused man is innocent, there’s uncertainty until much later in Festen as to the truth of the matter. Yet the audience knows, by the time the birthday dinner begins, that there’s something seriously amiss with all three of Helge’s surviving children – two sons, Michael as well as Christian, and a daughter, Helene, now in their thirties. Vinterberg cross-cuts frenetically between their respective dinner preparations and establishes: (a) that Christian doesn’t have a woman in his life and is physically remote from the hotel worker Pia who plainly adores him; (b) that Michael, although married with three kids, is aggressively unstable and foolish (at the very start he’s been left off the guest list as punishment for drunken behaviour at a family gathering the previous year: I missed how he managed to get his wife and himself reinstated); (c) that Helene has a decidedly neurotic air and is spooked by the prospect of spending the night in the suite in which Linda took her own life in the bathroom. (It’s certainly remarkably tactless of the party organisers, though dramatically convenient for the film-makers, to put Helene in the suite.) Helge’s snaky self-satisfaction and ruddy, jowly look immediately suggest a nasty piece of work. If all this adds up to uncertainty you wouldn’t want to watch Thomas Vinterberg trying to make things obvious.
Because of the characterisation of the party hosts and guests, Festen would be more challenging to liberal viewers if the sexual abuse claimed by Christian proved to be imagined. Helge, his wife Else and their social circle are well to do and revealed to be shockingly racist. If Helge – who seems to epitomise the values of the celebrants generally – were not a sexual predator, it might feel as if the whole gathering was being let off the hook for other hateful qualities. Thomas Vinterberg, in spite of the challenging subject matter and the extreme and unpleasant behaviour that he puts on screen, is not that daring. The Dogme 95 manifesto was a reaction against hugely expensive Hollywood products yet the resolution of the story in Festen is essentially Hollywood even if it’s achieved in a technically very different style. At breakfast the following morning, the wicked father is dismissed from future family life – and calmly dismissed – by none other than Michael. The latter, until now, has been helplessly angry and made derisory attempts to ingratiate himself with Helge; Michael even led the other guests in the singing of a racist song, on the arrival at the party of Helene’s black boyfriend, Gbatokai. Now that he sees what kind of a loving father Helge really was, Michael turns instantly into a responsible family man. Else, the despicably loyal wife, coldly disowns her husband. Whether these volte-faces are enough to change Christian’s opinion of his mother and brother isn’t made clear but his speeches were sufficient to get his own sexual hang-ups out of his system. He spends the night with Pia and next morning asks her to come and live with him in Paris, where he runs two successful restaurants.
Festen has been adapted for and performed on stage in several different countries and it may well be more satisfying in the theatre: I assume there can’t be anything like the overdone prelude to the dinner, in which case Christian’s first speech will come as a greater surprise. It’s also probably easier to accept in a stage production that the dinner guests don’t leave well before pudding. On screen, it’s implausible that even thick-skinned, well-heeled racists could sit through the shock of what they hear from Christian. Thomas Vinterberg is uneasy and uncertain about this aspect of the plotting. He and his co-writer Mogens Rukov come up with a comically improbable reason for people staying put. The speeches are transmitted to the hotel kitchen intercom. The kitchen staff – headed by the chef Kim who, as a boyhood friend of Christian, knows the truth of the allegations – hide the guests’ car keys in the fridge, although I wasn’t sure how they got hold of these keys in the first place. There’s a bit when the guests say they want to leave but they don’t spend long trying to escape (by calling a taxi, say) because Vinterberg wants to suggest that their natural reaction is to deny for as long as possible the truth of what Christian has to say – besides, they enjoy themselves singing the racist song. Helene has wanted to keep a low profile throughout the evening but, encouraged by Gbatokai, she speaks up when given her cue by the toastmaster and has the decisive last word in exposing Helge. She reads Linda’s suicide note which, with the help of the hotel receptionist Lars, she tracked down in her bedroom by following the rules of the ‘getting warmer’ game she and her siblings played as children.
Festen is well acted but there’s next to nothing unexpected that emerges about any character at any stage. Some of the cast are now familiar from appearances in other films or television. They include Ulrich Thomsen (Christian), Henning Moritzen (Helge), Thomas Bo Larsen (Michael), Paprika Steen (Helene), Birthe Neumann (Else), Trine Dyrholm (Pia), Bjarne Henrikson (Kim), Klaus Bondam (the toastmaster), Gbatokai Dakinah (Gbatokai) and Lars Brygmann (Lars).
27 May 2013