Misbegotten in
Mifune's radical stylings belie its clichéd core.
What
is it with filmmakers and mental retardation? It seems as though use of the
differently abled as a central theme ranks second only to troubled childhood
when it comes time to make a "personal" film. The connection between
the two is fairly obvious: The artist as gentle innocent besieged by a hostile
world (Shine, All the Little Animals) is often more profound and
"deep" in his or her simplicity than the rest of society with all its
neuroses. (If one is to take Sling Blade at face value, for example,
then we must assume that mental patients are exceptional at dealing with
dysfunctional fathers and gay rights issues.)
On a more superficial level,
filmmakers who see themselves as weird or insane are very fond of depicting
more obvious disorders: Crispin Glover, for one, has been trying for years to
make a movie about a village populated entirely by people with Down's syndrome,
and Harmony Korine managed to successfully pull off a very similar concept in Gummo.
The Danish "Dogme 95"
manifesto, which advocates a more stripped-down approach to directing and is
designed to bring out the truthfulness in performances rather than distract
from them with lights, props, and effects, seems to have particularly attracted
artists obsessed with such pseudoprofundity. There's Korine, of course, whose
Dogme film julien donkey-boy centered on a troubled schizophrenic and
his insane father; there's also Dogme cofounder Lars Von Trier, whose TV
mini-series The Kingdom featured a Greek chorus of dishwashers with
Down's syndrome as the only ones who really knew what was going on. And now we
have the latest Dogme release, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen's Mifune, the story
of a man and his mentally challenged brother, one which could have been pitched
in
Mifune begins with a wedding, as successful
businessman Kresten (Anders W. Berthelson) marries his boss' daughter.
Following a night of ludicrously wild sex, Kresten receives a call telling him
that his father has just died, a fact that comes as a shock to his wife, since
Kresten had always claimed not to have a father. It turns out that Kresten had
been embarrassed by his father's humble origins as a farmer and must now travel
out to the farm to take care of his retarded brother Rud, (Jesper Asholt),
until a suitable home or guardian can be found. Initially hostile to the
difficulty of tending to his spirited sibling, Kresten eventually warms to the
task and falls into a childhood pattern of pretending to be Toshiro Mifune's
character from The Seven Samurai, a game that Rud finds endlessly
amusing.
Matters get complicated when
Kresten places an ad for a housekeeper, and Liva (Iben Hjejle), a beautiful
call girl who has been having problems with her primary source of income, shows
up. Both Kresten and Rud are instantly smitten, naturally. When Liva's delinquent
adolescent son, Bjarke (Emil Tarding), comes to stay with them, things get even
more complicated, at least until Bjarke's cruel teasing of Rud turns into
admiration for a fellow "lost" child. In a reversal from his earlier
position, Kresten now starts to lie to Liva and Bjarke about his life as a
businessman. Needless to say, his two worlds will ultimately collide.
To the credit of both director
Jacobsen and Dogme founders Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, the minimalist
aesthetic does bring out some truly raw performances -- particularly in Hjejle
and Tarding -- and add an emotional truth to the proceedings, giving it the
feeling of a Mike Leigh film (like many of Leigh's films, it also keeps going
way after we get the point). It's too bad the material the actors have to work
with is so rote. Jacobsen hired professional script
doctor Mogens Rukov and the younger director Anders Thomas Jensen to help him
with the screenplay, which wasn't finished until four days before shooting
began. Bad idea. If you're going to pare down your
narrative techniques to the basics, there had better be a strong story behind
it. Even the best of actors can't make a masterpiece out of clichés (just ask
Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, or Samuel L. Jackson about their Star
Wars experience). In addition to Rud, whom we are alternately asked to
laugh at, laugh with, and admire for his profound simplicity, there's the old
"hooker with a heart of gold" story line, and the classic
"business + city life = bad; simplicity + farm + countryside = good"
routine. Not that these themes are unrealistic, but how many times have we seen
them before?
Under the Dogme guidelines, of
course, simplicity is better, at least from a technical standpoint. But
that doesn't mean that the ideas need be so simplistic. Vinterberg's The
Celebration had several subplots and levels going on at once, and julien
donkey-boy was nothing if not narratively challenging. Mifune has
been touted by its PR people as proof of how undogmatic Dogme can be, allegedly
freeing up a director of commercial films to turn in a great piece of
storytelling. So what is the point? Why use a radically monastic aesthetic to
make, essentially, a mainstream film, when using mainstream techniques would be
more likely to get it to an appreciative audience? The only answer that comes
to mind is gimmickry, pure and simple. And while a strong case could be made
that Dogme is inherently a promotional gimmick, it has at least delivered some
innovative films in the past. Mifune, however, is not one of them.