Film - Jonathan Romney sees the latest from the Dogmatic Danes
I recently asked a veteran avant-garde director about a film that he made in the mid-1960s. "Oh, that," he said, "that was a Dogme film." Only a year and some months after the first two productions from the Danish back-to-basics collective - Festen and Idiots - were unveiled at Cannes, Dogme 95 is beginning to look considerably less innovative than it seemed at first. This is not exactly an overnight backlash - right from the start, the group's extraordinary manifesto and set of ten proscriptive rules (the "Vow of Chastity") looked rather suspect. The rhetoric was fiery enough, but the rules seemed little more than a formalised recipe for an old-fashioned, ascetic strain of cinema povero - films must be shot only on location, music can be used only if it occurs where the scene is shot, props must already be available on site. The most provocative rule, suggestive of a radically anonymous collective oeuvre, specifies that the director must not be credited; but it was broached from the start, since everyone knew that Dogme 1 and 2 were directed by Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier respectively. The various directors' willingness to publicise their work in person has made Dogme look less like a radical art phalanx than a clever flag of PR convenience.
If nothing else, Dogme has allowed various film-makers to work cheaply and under stimulating restraints and has proved that audiences are willing to see films that aren't manicured in the traditional art-house fashion. Vinterberg's Festen, a small, anarchic family melodrama shot in abrasive camcorder textures, not only found an audience but sparked debate about aesthetics, funding and practice. You could easily have taken it to be the advance guard of a screen revolution. The irony was that the unknown Vinterberg had trumped the famous von Trier and his more confrontational Idiots - a hippieish disquisition on madness and society - by making a perfectly accessible chamber comedy jazzed up with kinetic camerawork.
The limits of the Dogme creed are becoming increasingly apparent. The group is now likely to redraft the rules, concerned that Dogme has turned into a commercial concept; indeed, plans are already afoot for a British franchise. But the possibilities of the original Vow clearly need to be tested more stringently. Dogme 5, Lovers, by the French actor Jean-Marc Barr, may follow the rules, yet this story of Parisian amour fou feels dead and dated, a throwback to third-hand ideas about nouvelle vague spirit - not even warmed-over Truffaut, more DIY Claude Lelouch.
The first American Dogme film, by the extremist wunderkind Harmony Korine, of Kids and Gummo notoriety, seems not to have set the Venice Festival alight. A colleague who saw julien: donkey boy there said it reminded him of the sort of thing you might have seen at the London Film-Makers' Co-op in the mid-1980s. But at least Korine has a provocateur's eye for the absurdities of Dogme rigour. His star, Chloe Sevigny, plays a pregnant character but wasn't actually pregnant herself: Korine pointed out that if he had followed the rules properly, he would have impregnated her personally, but there just wasn't time.
The biggest setback for Dogme may be the revelation that its rigorous requirements may not actually produce a film that's visually or formally striking, or that has the ring of hard necessity about it. Mifune (Dogme 3), released here this week, caused a buying frenzy when screened in Berlin, where it won the Silver Bear. That's hardy surprising: distributors probably latched on to it with relief, since it's so reassuringly unradical. It is directed by S0ren Kragh-Jacobsen, known to be a more conservative film-maker than either Vinterberg or von Trier, and shot conventionally on film rather than video. Even though the cinematographer is Anthony Dod Mantle, who shot Festen, there's nothing comparably immediate about the look of it; it's big on sweetly bucolic sunlight and the cosy glow of light bulbs by night.
Despite a few odd narrative elisions, Mifune has a conventionally well-tended script. A city slicker is called away to the depths of the Danish countryside, where his father has died in his crumbling farmhouse. He's left in charge of the house, and of his autistic brother, whom he placates by impersonating Toshiro Mifune in Seven Samurai. They're soon joined by a runaway prostitute, who signs on as housekeeper, and then by her brattish teenage brother. Despite initial rumblings, they soon form a happy family.
The most interesting thing about Mifune is that it shares its theme of exclusion and alternative community with the first two films - but whether this is somehow directly related to Dogme practice or just a Danish counter- culture pre-occupation is hard to say. But Mifune is an ingratiating genre piece at heart, a buddy movie with the distinctly patronising odour of Rain Man. I'd like to propose a rule 11 - "No narratives that lend themselves to a Hollywood remake".
Meanwhile in the US, a group of no-budget independent film-makers, using their own game-like methods, have struck gold with what fortuitously feels remarkably Dogmatic - the astonishingly successful chiller The Blair Witch Project. It will be interesting to see whether the Dogmatists take this parallel into account when they rewrite the charter. There's clearly something lacking if their supposedly iron-clad laws can result in something as soft and unthreatening as Mifune - just a cloying little Danish art movie.
"Mifune" (15) continues at the Curzon Soho, Gate, Ritzy, Renoir and other selected London cinemas
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