Unhappy Families
There is something so earnest about a certified Dogme
95 film. And "certified" is key to these films'
authenticity. Harmony Korine caused something of a
mini-controversy for claiming that his Julien
Donkey Boy was a Dogme film, when the film didn't
bear the pre-opening credits certificate, and despite
the fact that he so earnestly (and dogmatically)
insisted that he had adhered to the strict technical
and thematic limitations of the code.
For those of you unfamiliar with the basic tenets of
Dogme 95, it is a manifesto that was issued by a loose
collective of international (mostly European)
filmmakers that cavils against the state of modern
cinema, and particularly the wretched excesses of
standard Hollywood fare. Just so, the group has called
for a return to a sort of bare bones filmmaking. No
artificial lighting. No intrusive special effects or
musical soundtracks. No fantasy flights into specific
genres. In fact, no genre films at all. And, in terms
of narrative, nothing that might not actually happen
in real world lives and situations. Dogme films, in
other words, must adhere to a resolute realism.
The potential downfalls of this cinematic dogmatism
are twofold. First is a thematic problem, in so far as
the films are constrained by the limits of "realism."
In order to stick to depictions of real life, Dogme
films have relied on experiences of human indignity
and abuse. Since they are in short supply in life,
apparently, happiness and pleasure don't make for
compelling realistic movies. One rather dour
consequence of this is the implicit suggestion that
human beings are, by "nature," miserable. What this
dwelling in the tragic also means is that Dogme films
often slip into what might be the code's own genre
(despite its edict against genres), which is
melodrama. Surely, "real life" cannot be as uniformly
bleak at these films so often aver.
The second, and connected, problem is that these human
melodramas work best on a small scale. To tell the
specifics of anyone's misery, it is best to stick with
a small, select group of characters. This is what made
Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration so smart
and successful. In the film, a family gathers at a
small, isolated country estate for the patriarch's
60th birthday, during the celebration of which all
sorts of skeletons come raging out of dusty closets.
The film is as claustrophobic as the rural manse, and
we spend a great deal of time getting to know the
intricacies of the family's intimate relationships.
Unfortunately, Lone Scherfig's Italian for
Beginners is a more sprawling affair. The film
takes on too much, or at least too many characters,
and as a result, often loses cohesion. Set in a drab,
semi-rural Danish suburb presumably somewhere on the
outskirts of Copenhagen), it chronicles a short period
in the lives of a group of lonely and dispirited
thirty-something singles. There's Andreas (Anders W.
Berthelsen), the pastor who recently lost his wife,
sent to replace the newly faithless Pastor Wredman
(Bent Mejding), who (not so) coincidentally has also
recently lost his own wife. And then there is Hal-Finn
(Lars Kaalund), the misanthropic and opinionated
sports bar/restaurant manager, and his pal, Jorgen
(Peter Gantzler), the impotent hotel clerk. Also along
for the ride are Karen (Ann Eleonora Jorgensen, an
honest to god ringer for Frances McDormand), a
hairdresser with a terminally ill, morphine-addicted
mother; and Olympia (Anette Stovelbaek), a clumsy
bakery worker (whose ungainliness, we learn, is the
result of fetal alcohol syndrome) with a terminally
atrocious father.
The device that brings all these disparate characters
together? They all take a conversational Italian class
at a local community center. Well, okay, it
could happen, although the class would be
pretty dreary with this sad lot. The lumping together
of all these characters with their similar tragedies
in and around one little local language class seems
just a bit too convenient, so that taken all together
the film hardly feels "realistic" at all.
In order to mitigate the convenience of this
situation, Scherfig (who also wrote the script) also
connects her characters in another way: all suffer
from similar familial and/or sexual dysfunctions. In
the famous opening lines of Anna Karenina,
Tolstoy wrote, "All happy families resemble one
another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own
way." In Scherfig's hands, this axiom is twisted past
recognition. There are no happy families, and all
unhappy families resemble one another. Or at least all
unhappy people are unhappy for similar reasons.
The failures of love, of constancy and devotion, in
human relationships is the main theme here, and
Scherfig spins out many such failures in her
characters' travails. Karen, for instance, tries
gamely to retain some sort of affection for her
mother, even while her mother's illness is an
emotional and economic burden, and even though her
mother constantly berates her choice of career and
accuses Karen of "dressing like a whore." Similarly,
Olympia suffers the verbal abuse and vitriol of her
elderly father with unending patience, all in the name
of trying to preserve the fantasy of a "happy" and
"normal" family life. Of course, things get
complicated as the group gathers for their weekly
language lesson, and they (and we) discover how
similar their individual miseries are to each other's.
Through their interactions in and outside of the
Italian class, all these characters assert one, or
perhaps two, things: families suck and love is at most
dicey, and fleeting at the very least.
Where Italian for Beginners differs from other
Dogme 95 fare is that its end isn't totally
catastrophic. This isn't to say it has a happy ending,
just that it doesn't end with the usual emotional
wasteland littered by human wreckage (as in The
Celebration). Karen and Olympia, for example, can
finally admit to themselves, in the wake of their
respective parent's deaths, exactly how loveless and
dysfunctional their family lives were. And once they
meet, at Andreas' church, where both of their parents'
funerals are taking place (how's that for
"coincidence"), they discover the secret of their own,
unknown, long lost relationship.
From this point the two women begin to construct a new
sense of family with each
other, fully aware of the abuses in each other's past.
And so too do Andreas,
Hal-Fin, and Jorgen work through their various
traumas, with the help, and sometimes interference, of
their classmates, and move hesitantly towards some
sort of happiness. And this is the best reason to
spend some time with Scherfig's so very unhappy
individuals and families.
