Tag Archives: Dogme 95

Newest Hollywood Trend: Borrowing Susanne Bier

Posted on by Colleen Claes
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On December 4, Lionsgate will release a film called Brothers, described as a “drama/war” film on Wikipedia. The movie stars Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Tobey Maguire, and is directed by Irish filmmaker, Jim Sheridan. It’s an American remake of a Danish movie by the same title, directed by Susanne Bier (After the Wedding, Things We Lost in the Fire), written by Anders Thomas Jensen, and released in 2004.

Now why is a film that not many people have heard of from just five years ago being remade? Well, I have some thoughts on that.

On April 26, 2007, Zach Braff made the following announcement on his official blog:

What else? My dream-first choice- hero of mine – actor wants to do the next film I’m set to direct, “Open Hearts”, but I don’t think I’m gonna be able to direct it this summer as I had hoped since I’m due to be back at Scrubs on August 1st.

Open Hearts will also be an American remake of a Danish film of the same name, this one released in 2002…and also directed by Susanne Bier and written by Anders Thomas Jensen. It’s a Dogme 95 film, which in brief means that it’s devoid of all the “fancy” tricks and methods of conventional filmmaking. (You can read more details about it in another post from a few weeks ago.) Essentially, Bier’s Open Hearts is a story of a woman who cheats on her paralyzed husband…with the husband of the woman who caused the tragic accident.

The tone of Bier’s film is uncomfortable, primarily, with a stroke of raw heartbreak. It sounds like a melodrama, but it feels more like a couple’s home videos you were never, ever supposed to see.

What will Zach Braff do with this story? I honestly don’t think I want to know. But I’ll take a guess anyway – I think he’ll ruin it. I think he’ll try to capture the same effect, but while playing a Thievery Corporation song on top of it. I think he’ll cast well-known “indie” actors, and I think the film will look nice and pretty, with well-composed shots throughout. But hey, maybe he’ll prove me wrong. We’ll have to see in 2011, which is currently the estimated release of Braff’s remake.

But back to the more timely matter. Bier and Jensen’s film from 2004, Brothers (Brødre), is not a Dogme 95 film, but it still retains a candid and uncomfortably honest spirit such as in Open Hearts. The plot – again – sounds like a melodrama: When the older brother is declared dead while fighting in Afghanistan, the younger brother starts to take care of the widowed wife and her kids. Within time, the younger brother and the widow fall for each other. However, everyone’s lives get turned upside down when they find out the older brother is actually still alive.

It sounds like a soap opera, but it doesn’t feel like one when you watch it. This is the best trailer I found for the original Brothers, which might give you little insight into the tone of the movie.

What sparked this post was this trailer (Trailer 1) for the remake. No, you can’t always judge a movie by its trailer, but something already seems off about it. The scenes look almost identical to the original, but it feels like a sensational love story that turns into a thriller. “This is not right,” my mind keeps saying as I watch the preview. Hearing Natalie Portman murmur apathetically, “I thought you were dead” doesn’t help matters much either. This is how the film could turn out: forced emotion with bland, uninterested acting and not-so-subtle writing. (One of the reasons these stories worked in Bier’s films is because Jensen wrote them with the philosophy that not everything needs to be said.)

You could easily argue that these are remakes, and given that alone, they are supposed to different. They are supposed to be reinterpreted based on whatever style or mood the filmmakers are trying to achieve. This is true. But I believe these remakes are completely pointless. For one, these are not classic films. Instead, they are relatively unknown, foreign, contemporary films. They were both released less than ten years ago.

But I think Hollywood executives and directors like Zach Braff see these films and are merely struck by their brutal honesty. Then they say, “Hey, that was pretty good…I’m going to tell that story myself!” But the thing is – you’re stripping that story of the rawness and grittiness that made it good in the first place. Without these things, it just becomes another adulterous melodrama, and all you’re left with is the soap opera plotline played out by some well-known actors.

This is not about elitism, or liking something just because it’s smaller and lesser-known.  It’s about the essence of something. And when you change the essence of something unique and specifically good, it just looks like anything else.

In a few sentences? These Danish movies work because they aren‘t Hollywood. Taking something that’s great because it’s not Hollywood and then making it Hollywood? That might be the definition of “counterproductive.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: I will give Sheridan’s Brothers a fair chance and see it when it comes out in theaters. I will also try to be as unbiased as possible when analyzing the film’s quality in a review. This, however, is just a rant/observation.

Favorites Revisited #3: ‘Rachel Getting Married’ and The Honest Film

Posted on by Colleen Claes
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For reasons that I can’t always articulate, Rachel Getting Married is heavenly to me. So imperfect that it’s perfect. So brutal that it’s beautiful…These are just a few of the conflicting phrases that come to mind when I watch this movie. I’d like to think that any complaint you might have about the film, I could find a reason to say: “Yeah, but THAT’S what’s so great about it!” Try me.

rachel-getting-married

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sinemabed/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

I watched it for the umpteenth time with my mother one night. The film deals with – to say the least – family troubles, so I thought she would appreciate it, or at least find it moving. Though she sat through the movie patiently, her final thoughts were: “It was just…weird. It made me uncomfortable.”

And really, that’s what’s so great about it. It’s uncomfortable. It’s so honest and anti-what-we-think-a-movie-should-be that it makes us uncomfortable. A majority of the people I know described the first thirty minutes as “slow…and weird…not a lot happens.” This is also (see, I told you I could do it) another reason why it’s great. Director Jonathan Demme takes the audience completely out of its element by making it feel as though you’re not even watching a movie, but rather, you’re watching all of these lives take place. And they’re laid out just as they are – all the fighting, the ugliness, the lack of communication, the resentment, and everything else that most families don’t want you to see. (Because that would be…uncomfortable.)

I read that Demme confessed somewhere that Rachel Getting Married was filmed with Dogme 95 in mind. For those who don’t know, Dogme 95 is – in short – a film movement initiated by Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in 1995, with the intentions of stripping films of their “Hollywood.” (You can read the official rules  here.)

By its very nature, filmmaking is a deceptive and artificial process. And I don’t even mean in terms of story or characters – just the basics: lighting, sound, special effects, etc. These are some of the very things that von Trier and Vinterberg wanted to eliminate with the Dogme 95 movement. And why? To focus on one thing only: the story.

Thus, if you watch accredited Dogme 95 works, you’ll see that they’re very raw-looking. Jerky camera movements because it’s all hand-held, and no special lighting or fancy effects. But you can say one thing about them (or, most of them, since I’m personally not a fan of whatever “Julien Donkey Boy” is, for instance): You’re completely involved in the story and its characters.

Rachel Getting Married reminds me of an upscale Dogme 95 movie. They have a better camera, awesome set design and locations, and more well-known and acclaimed actors. But that doesn’t mean the essence of Dogme 95′s honesty isn’t there. There’s not much artificial lighting, most of it (if not all) appears to be hand-held camera, and overall the main focus is on the story and the characters. Not much else.

And both the story and the characters are heartbreaking, imperfect, conflicting, and contradictory. But they’re real. My favorite scene in Rachel Getting Married is when Anne Hathaway’s character, Kym, is spilling her guts out to her family. Kym made a horrible mistake that tore her family apart a few years ago, and she can’t seem to make anything right, or apologize enough. She asks, “Who do I have to be now?” This quote keeps popping into my head as I write this. Because what does film have to be now? What more can it be?

I believe we’re at a place in film where everything has been done. So many limits in technology, effects, and plots have been breached that maybe we can’t take it anymore. We still want creativity and entertainment, but maybe we want those things on smaller scales and budgets, and within realms that we recognize as our own. Maybe we want movies that don’t feel like movies, but like real life instead.

The mainstream public might not have noticed it ten years ago, but I think the Dogme 95 creators were really on to something here.