They do not have to hit their marks on the floor, and all the lamps and dollies and other equipment is taken away. “The major, major difference is that in the editing room I took the power completely away from the actors,” he says, “and even though it looks like a wild monster, Festen is a very, very controlled film.” When they saw it, some of Vinterberg’s cast couldn’t recognise their performances, because he had removed or reshaped so much of their work – an occupational hazard they might face in other screen roles, but never in the theatre.Vinterberg, whose second feature, It’s All About Love, abandoned the Dogme rules, claims that “even during filming I thought it would be obvious to make Festen into a play,” and in 1999, not long after it reached British cinemas, Canadian producer Marla Rubin had the same idea and secured the stage rights Vinterberg, Rukov and another writer called Bo hr. Everyone had to act in every shot, not just the one actor in close-up, pretending there are a lot of people around him [as would happen on a non-Dogme film].” In one crucial respect, of course, Festen was anything but theatrical, because Vinterberg, like von Trier in Dogville, was still armed with the most potent of all film-making tools: control of point of view. The Dogme rule that you can’t add sound after filming meant that during the birthday dinner all the [off-camera] sound of knives and forks had to be done on every take. In taking the Dogme “vow of chastity” that bans genre movies, “superficial action (murders, weapons etc)” and all but the most basic techniques (no sets or artificial lighting, no post-produced sound or music, hand-held cameras only), the pair forced themselves to focus all their and their audiences’ attention on dialogue and character – two ingredients that have always been at the heart of good theatre.
In the first Dogme feature, Vinterberg’s Festen (The Celebration, 1998), the combination of these technical restrictions, raw ensemble performances, a country house setting and a Hamlet-influenced story of a son exposing the rotten state of a Danish family, took cinema very close to its theatrical roots. When the Danish directors Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier launched their Dogme 95 film-making manifesto, they were reacting against the emotionally manipulative and formulaic Hollywood narratives that they saw assuming ever greater control of the world’s cinemas. Even so, it’s hard to think of many recent British films so likely to start arguments.j.romney independent.co.uk.

There’s also the questionable equation of working-class life with lurid abjection (Ken Loach would go spare), and it’s hard not to see Billy and Paul as middle-class brats on a gratuitous jaunt of social tourism. This makes for some sharp comedy at his expense, but it’s hard to care for someone who so much comes across as a petulant waster. By compensation, Warren’s Billy comes across as all appetite, demonic principle rather than human being; still, it’s an alarmingly energetic performance, and sometimes nastily witty. In fact, Billy’s rebel attitude is not only contemptuous of everyone except himself, but also conforms perfectly to the commodification of extremes that these days is considered perfectly mainstream, less a radical philosophy than a lifestyle option.

His programme is straight out of an FHM feature on “100 Things A Man Should Do Before He’s 30″, and it’s a wonder he and Paul never get round to snowboarding.The problem is, however, that between wild-eyed hedonism and the adult responsibility embodied (however seductively) by Juliette, the film doesn’t quite manage to offer a richer shading of possibilities. Then there’s the film’s other startling moment, shot in a real-life Sheffield swingers’ club where Billy, happily stuck into the mingle, cheerily announces to Paul, “Do you know where we are? We’re right at the bottom.” That claim comes across as outright posturing and an arrant insult to Sheffield’s swinging burghers. One reason is because Paul himself never seems capable of a more nuanced position: as played by the rather testy Newman, he’s less convincing as a hero on an odyssey of self-discovery than as a weak-spirited adolescent with a bad case of homoerotic hero worship. The kinetically grisly fights are certainly jaw-dropping, with 11-year-old boys biting, ripping, reducing each other’s already beefy heads to chunks of bloody meat.

Only Juliette sees through him, realising that his show-stopping account of an horrific childhood is cribbed straight from Bataille.The spectacle of extremity, with which Billy captivates Paul, is also what Woolcock uses to mesmerise us. Even so, Woolcock appears to present Billy in an ironic, rather than strictly Byronic light, as a self-aggrandising prat drunk on second-hand rhetoric. Certainly Marc Warren is seductively feral, with his perpetual snarl and uncanny resemblance to Malcolm McDowell in his prime (a comparison Warren must be heartily sick of by now). the living dead” (defending one such elderly “zombie”, Paul can only weakly protest, “But he’s washing his car.”).The principle of Principles is not so far from Fight Club, in which the square-john hero was mentored by his demonic alter ego, by way of protest against consumerism and the decline of the American male.Woolcock’s story is not nearly so apocalyptic, and Billy’s rebellion comes across as more personal than genuinely ideological. It’s a movie with no ambitions except to be OK, and that’s just what it is.