Last Year at Marienbad(1961) and
The Celebration(1998)
Interesting to watch two films, thirty years apart that are roughly about the same thing (a party) and take very different approaches to the story.
In the Celebration the film is about a father and a son, the son accuses the father of raping him as a child and driving his sister to suicide. In Last Year at Marienbad it's the story of a man who believes his lover has returned to him.
Marienbad has a dreamlike quality to it, every shot is expertly framed. You can interpret the film as a dream or walking through a museum and noting the art. The estate is decadent, the people feel barely human you can't really get a grasp of the personality of anyone...they are cyphers.
In the Celebration you know everyone, and you see the ugliness of everyone. People just walk around and tell you what you need to know about them. Mental health issues, insecurities racial hangups all just on display. You are specifically told what to feel about everyone. The roles of the characters are regimented everything that happens in the story you know exactly what is going on.
Ironically enough Vinterberg shoots the film with a handycam and still tries to make all of these fancy shots. It fails horribly, Dogme95 films believe in the idea that Hollywood and over production is bad...yet the film has a huge cast, takes place in a giant, and you can't make out a damn thing half the time your watching it.
Resnais from the French New Wave took an opposite approach where he doesn't explain a damn thing to you. But every shot is just mesmerizing he's giving a mood and touching on your emotions. While with Celebration it's sex, violence, drama...things happen that don't really happen in the real world but because it's shot like a home movie we the audience are I suppose just supposed to forgive it.
I liked Festen the first time I saw it...I was a teenager at the time and the gossip, sex, and violence was awesome. But now when I revisit it a shadow is cast on the film. This movement had ideals and yet knowing what the director became it's sadder to me. Vinterberg ended up making really good looking movies after this...films that would be dull, he moved on and grew up...so I think in a lot of ways this film is just a reminder of an artists early flawed works.
Resnais on the other hand I look back at this and feel like I watched a masterpiece, I had an emotional connection to the work as opposed to the analytical one from Festen.
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