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 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 miniseries The Kingdom featured a Greek chorus of dishwashers with Down 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, which could have been pitched in Hollywood as "Funny Farm meets Rain Man, with a dash of Pretty Woman."
Mifune begins with a wedding, as successful businessman Kresten (Anders W. Berthelson) marries his boss' daughter (Sofie Gråbøl). 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 but must now travel out to the farm to take care of his mentally 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, currently costarring in High Fidelity), 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 brother 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, and 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.
