October 29–November 5, 1998

movie shorts

The Celebration

recommended

A patriarch's 60th birthday party turns into a family's last stand, as past wrongs are dragged into the light. The basic setup is no different from a hundred thousand other movies, but what makes The Celebration special is that the revelations come at the beginning, not at the end. Instead of the naïve view that bad behavior is always punished, and that unpleasant truths are always accepted, the film operates according to a far more sophisticated viewpoint, that nothing is harder than getting people to accept something they don't want to hear. It would violate the film's structure to give away any more of the plot, but suffice it to say that The Celebration feels like a ghost story even though it isn't one. The camera keeps cutting to odd angles which look like POV shots, but by the end of the film those shots are what you start to think about: do they represent the watchful eye of God, or merely the camera's impassive and amoral eye? Directorial credit, by the way, goes to "Dogma 95," which is a aesthetic manifesto signed by director Thomas Vinterborg and Lars von Trier (among others) which prohibits the use of artificial light and post-production sound. But The Celebration doesn't feel like a film produced by manifesto; it's deeply personal in ways even von Trier's work hasn't touched, and without the better-known director's manipulative iron hand.

—Sam Adams