"The Celebration" (1998)

The first thing you're likely to notice while watching The Celebration is its look. It's a film of stark minimalism; the lighting and camera quality is very low budget; the cameras are handheld and shaky and besides a handful of scenes there's not a whole lot of incredibly technically impressive shots beyond the fact that it's kind of impressive that anything got filmed under such limited circumstances. This is all deliberate though; writer-director Tomas Vinterberg was a founding member of Dogme 95, a Danish film collective that wanted to make movies that stayed away from Hollywood conventions of filmmaking. The emphasis was character, theme, etc. and all that good stuff that special effects and big studio budgets had increasingly been diluting movies of. The Celebration could easily be told without sticking to the rules of Dogme 95 but the style of the film feeds into the story. It's shot with a claustrophobic intimacy that only makes the revelations at the 60th birthday of Helge Kligenfeldt all the more unbearable and relentless to witness. Helge's son Christian proposes a toast during the festivities -- except it's not your typical toast -- he says he and his recently deceased twin sister, who committed suicide, were sexually abused by their father -- and the confession suddenly starts making everyone more combustible and surreally, unpleasantly in denial. Christian, and the family in general, has to keep pushing forward to crush the denial and to come to terms with what has happened. 

Grade: B+