Friday, May 27, 2011

The salutary tale of Thomas Vinterberg, ghost of filmic failure past

Lars von Trier's Cannes slating calls to mind the fate of his fellow Danish film-maker, who likewise fell abruptly from critical grace

And so this year's Cannes turned out to be a tale of two Danes. Engulfed in acclaim was Nicolas Winding Refn, the longtime wunderkind now making good on his youthful promise to claim the award for best director with his arthouse noir Drive. Drowned in opprobrium, of course, was Lars von Trier ? about whom too much has surely already been written but who, however absurdly, emerged as the chief talking point of the whole shebang. The two even shared a public spat to further hog the attention.

All of which put me in mind of a third Danish film-maker, technically absent from the festivities but lurking in the background like a Scandinavian Marley's ghost ? the spectral figure of Thomas Vinterberg. Because not so very long ago it was Vinterberg who was the toast of the Croisette, a rockstar in the fusty confines of European cinema. His 1998 instant classic Festen won the jury prize, its triumph nudging von Trier into the shade (Refn at this point was still just a disreputable pup, with only his debut Pusher behind him). With a powerful story of familial rot, and a beautifully scuffed-up visual identity which came from being shot on early digital video, Festen was a film that left its mark on the audience, and its influence has rippled outwards ever since (not least in the work of Danny Boyle, who would soon begin a long working relationship with Anthony Dod Mantle, the movie's cinematographer).

But it wasn't just Festen that inspired the hubbub around Vinterberg. Much of it came from his co-founding, with Von Trier, of Dogme 95, the film-making movement based on the stripped-down "vows of chastity" ? the traditional techniques with which the movie was shot.. Hovering dead on the line between prankishness and something genuinely radical, there was a bracing sense of cheek to Dogme and its deadpan rejection of so much of the technical artifice that had become mainstream cinema's MO. Selling the movement to the world Von Trier was, as ever, the clown ? but it was Vinterberg, not yet 30, who lent things a chiselled glamour and, some believed, was the more naturally gifted of the pair.

He wasn't short of self-belief. I met him three times in that period. At the end of 1998, with Festen about to come out in Britain, we did an interview in the gleaming bar of a London hotel in which he fluently held forth for well over an hour, pausing in mid-sentence when the tape had to be turned over, then seamlessly continuing. A year later, I met him in a Copenhagen cafe, ostensibly to talk about the history of Danish cinema. By now, he was a man with a global triumph on his CV, approached with reverence by journalists and waiting staff alike. Six months after that I saw him again in Denmark; now at least some of his days were being spent in a chalet on the grounds of Von Trier's Zentropa production company, apparently writing the follow-up to Festen. Whatever came next would, according to the rumours there, be lavish, subversive, a surefire masterpiece.

Only it wasn't. After five years spent alternately locked up at Zentropa and "celebrating himself" around the world, Vinterberg's next film at last emerged. Titled It's All About Love, it featured bemused duo Joaquin Phoenix and Clare Danes in a story of apocalyptic omens and ice skating shot through with whimsy, romance and attempted profundity. Informed by its director's desire to get as far away from the strictures of Dogme as possible, it was a loopy, candy-floss folly that looked lovely even as it boggled the mind. Professionally it was, of course, a disaster ? if not quite career suicide, then certainly a messy cry for help.

Next time, he moved quicker, but managed to tie himself in knots in the process. Presumably in reaction to the time it took him to write his last film, he now set to work on a prefab screenplay by Von Trier called Dear Wendy, a fable about American gun culture. While there were scattered moments when it came to life on screen, it was a project doomed both by its own flaws and by its writer having trodden awkwardly similar political and artistic ground in his own Dogville less than a year before. It was the wrong film at the wrong time, every bit as slated as its predecessor ? and two consecutive kickings were enough for Vinterberg, still only in his mid 30s, to flee in retreat.

Last year, there was a comeback of sorts with Submarino, an account of adult brothers adrift in a squalid Copenhagen. Screened at the London film festival last autumn without fanfare ? despite the presence of the director to promote it ? it turned out to be a raw slice of humanism that was so relentlessly bleak it stood absolutely no chance of finding anyone here to distribute it. It was an admirably defiant strategy for a film-maker some might expect to be desperate for exposure, and a shame for anyone who would want to see his movies outside festival screenings.

All told, it's a frustrating story. There are different explanations. Some feel he was a lucky one-hit wonder, others think Festen was overpraised in the first place. I'd disagree on both counts. For me, it feels likelier that the five-year hiatus after Festen created an impossible pressure for Vinterberg, and that ? when it was finally written ? It's All About Love was meant as a statement so personal as to take that pressure and double it. You don't always come back from the setback if those kinds of things don't work out. Then again, as Von Trier would probably agree, personal statements can be a risky business.


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/may/27/thomas-vinterberg-lars-von-trier-film

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