It was a real surprise, then, to encounter The Celebration on cable late one night. It takes an especially gripping and inventive movie to wake me up from cable-zombification (in which what I watch takes a far back seat to the simple act of watching something) and realize I'm watching something great. I immediately suspected it was a Dogme film because of the natural, seemingly improvised performances and organic camera work, but it had none of the outright unpleasantness of von Trier's stuff. Though there's some superfucked sickness to it, and a bleakness that could only have come from Denmark, these elements are used to serve an amazingly good story, presented in consistently unexpected ways, with performances as stunning as I've ever seen. What initially seems like a sort of Big Chill-type deal, with friends and family gathering at a large estate for an esteemed patriarch's 60th birthday party, immediately detours into the darkness of the human heart as you learn that one of the children has recently killed herself. The other children all seem to have their struggles (one is a rageful adulterer, another is characterized as mentally ill, a third seems hysterical and ashamed). But things really get interesting when the "crazy" eldest son rises from his seat to deliver the first toast of the evening, and at the end of a charismatic and funny story, caps it by mentioning off-hand that the father raped him and his now-dead sister for years when they were children. The subsequent moments are so full of awkward tension you're not sure whether this is about to turn into a mean-spirited black comedy a la Happiness or a bitter and fragmented dissection like one of Woody Allen's Bergman pastiches. Amazingly, it takes neither direction, instead deriving a totally weird tone out of the juxtaposition of the family secrets being revealed and the intention of the family to keep the formal dinner going full-steam. The reactions of the dinner-guests range from complete blankness to frustration to despair as they realize they can't leave (the kitchen staff, serving almost as mischievous Shakespearean faeries, have hidden all the car keys), so everyone is left to attend the proceedings to the brutal end, and after countless bottles of wine, the end is decidedly brutal. It's totally unflinching, purposeful, and, while in some ways subversively in-your-face, ultiimately very powerful and beautiful. As strong a cinematic work of art as I've seen in a long, long time … it justifies Dogme no matter what else is associated it. I should have figured there'd be a shining exception to the overall lameness of the "movement" … as the Beats had Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Elephant 6 had Elf Power. Gotta be careful throwing out the bathwater, sure enough.
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