Following the twin provocations/inspirations of Thomas Vinterberg's Festen and Lars Von Trier's The Idiots, Mifune, the third film to be released under the Dogme 95 banner, with its Spartan strictures on use of camera, lighting, design and sound, is a more conventional affair than its predecessors, both in theme and treatment.
Director Sren Kragh-Jacobsen comes from an older generation of Danish film-makers than Von Trier and Vinterberg, and his description of what attracted him to the Dogme rules ("In every musician's life there comes a time and place where you want to go back to basics, where you want to play unplugged. That's what Dogme 95 is all about.") might cause one to fear that he would be the Eric Clapton of Dogme. He's not, and in many ways it's a fine film, but it's located far more within the European mainstream than its two punkish predecessors, although it echoes some of their concerns.
Like Festen, Kragh-Jacobsen's film centres on a dysfunctional family trapped in an apparently serene rural setting; like The Idiots, it deals with the disruptive and potentially liberating effect of mental disability on conservative social structures. Anders W. Berthelsen plays Kresten, a Copenhagen yuppie who, on his wedding night, receives a phone call telling him his father has died, and that his mentally disabled brother, Rud (Jesper Asholt) is alone on the family farm. Since he has told his bride (Sofie Grabl) that he has no family, this revelation precipitates a marital crisis and Berthelsen's departure for the remote farm.
Once there, he finds looking after his brother on his own too difficult, and advertises for a housekeeper, giving the job to Liva (Iben Hjelje), a prostitute seeking to escape from her former life. The three strike up an awkward friendship, despite suffering a series of catastrophes.
In its portrait of the superiority of rural simplicity to urban corruption, its hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold central character, and its sincerely-held belief in the human capacity for self-redemption, Mifune (the obscure title soon becomes clear as the film progresses) is an unashamedly old-fashioned humanist parable, and none the worse for that.
The performances are uniformly strong, if never particularly surprising, and there's a vein of nicely underplayed humour running through the entire story. Shot in Academy ratio on 35mm film, it's easily the most conventionally pretty of the Dogme films. Cameraman Anthony Dod Mantle, who also shot Festen (on digital video) here achieves a much more luxurious image - at times, one suspects he's bending some of the Dogme rules a little (did he really manage to get those exposures without any artificial lighting?).
Rules, especially those as arbitrary or even capricious as those in the Dogme Vow of Chastity, are made to be broken. One wonders, though, if this agreeable but unspectacular drama would have received nearly as much international media attention had it not waved the Dogme flag - with the explosion of interest worldwide in various kinds of lo-fi film production, it may be time to haul down that particular flag and store it away for a while.
Big Daddy (12) General release
After The Wedding Singer and The Waterboy, the inexplicable rise and rise of Adam Sandler continues with this huge US box-office success, an execrable sentimental comedy, set in New York, in which the infantile Sandler adopts a five-year-old boy (played by identically repellent twins Cole and Dylan Sprouse) whom he teaches to urinate on walls and to trip rollerbladers. Nobody comes out well of this farrago (Joey Lauren Adams, who plays the rudimentary love interest, is going to have to learn to wipe that silly smirk off her face), but it's Sandler's wheedling, ingratiating performance which really turns the stomach.
The Love Letter (15) Selected cinemas
With Kate Capshaw both producing and starring in this whimsical romantic comedy set in a sleepy New England coastal town, it's hard to ignore the whiff of "vanity project" which hangs over the whole thing. Capshaw's acting career may have slipped off most people's radar in recent years, but she is Mrs Steven Spielberg after all, which must have helped a little when she was waiting for the studios to return her calls (in fact, the film was produced by Spielberg's DreamWorks). None of which need have any bearing on the quality of the finished product; as it happens, it's dreadful.
Capshaw plays Helen McFarquhar, bookshop owner, divorcee and disillusioned romantic, whose life is altered by her discovery of a mysterious unsigned love letter, which she presumes is addressed to her. In rapid (and highly implausible) succession, other townsfolk find the letter and come to the same conclusion: Capshaw's friend and employee (Ellen DeGeneres), the local fireman (Tom Selleck), a young student (Tom Everett Scott), and so on (and on, and on . . . ).
Hong Kong director Peter HoSun Chan makes his American debut with this insubstantial fare, and doesn't do a very impressive job; the film feels unpleasantly claustrophobic, the humour stilted and the acting unconvincing. Capshaw, in particular, gives an annoyingly mannered and self-indulgent performance. Worst of all, though, is Luis Bacalov's incredibly intrusive and grating score, which had me praying for the end credits to come as soon as possible.
