In danger of becoming as well known for his good looks as for his movies, Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg entered into the spirit of childs play with fellow director Lars von Trier Breaking the Waves 1996, taking a Vow of Chastity as part of their Dogma 95 and finding liberation in the selfimposed limits. Though the tireless selfpromoter won both praise and scorn for his halfserious, half tongueincheek embrace of Dogma 95, with some parties sneering he wasnt exactly reinventing the wheel by walking in the footprints of Cassavetes, De Sica and Altman, he certainly backed all the talk with a brilliant film adhering to the manifestos edicts, FestenThe Celebration 1998, an expertly paced melodrama employing child abuse as a catalyst to explore unbridled machismo, patriarchal arrogance and the prevalence of Danish racism. His feature debut, De Storste helteThe Greatest Heroes 1996, had been a fairly typical example of the road movie genre and paled in comparison.Vinterberg became established with his thesis film Last Round 1993, which won the jury and producers awards at the International Student Film Festival in Munich and first prize in Tel Aviv. He followed with the TV drama Dregen der Gik BaglaensThe Boy Who Walked Backwards 1995 and The Greatest Heroes before hitting the mother lode of critical acclaim with The Celebration. Wishing to evoke the dramatic breadth of Strindberg and the cinematic panache of Bergman, Vinterberg unleashed his video cameras fudging Dogma 95 principles a bit by later blowing the video up to the prescribed 35mm on an upperclass, dysfunctional Danish family, with friends, spouses and lovers in tow, as they mark the patriarchs 60th birthday. When the oldest son Christian, displaying the melancholy and mordant wit of a latter day Hamlet, calmly accuses his father of incest before the assembled, it sets the stage for a long night and even the next morning of revelation, and the frenetic handheld camera movements perfectly captured the films nervous evocation of moral chaos. The running gag is how the party never ends, that no matter what appalling act has just been disclosed, the guests never drop their sense of propriety. Their attitude is, Lets have our coffee.

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