IMDb ??? Review: Festen (1998)

Source: Wikipedia

Known to audiences abroad as The Celebration, this zero-budget Dutch drama celebrates dysfunctional families with a one hundred-minute ode to non-consenting incest, suicide, and shaky-cam.

Once every ten years, the family members and their insignificant others gather to celebrate something-or-other. This time, a birthday, which quickly takes a turn for the sordid. The gathering engenders gossip, marital spats, and a hidden letter from a dead sister.

Underneath the tuxedos and evening gowns, nearly every character is a terrible human being. Abusive, deceptive, or manipulative–stupid, selfish, or cowardly. The most sympathetic characters, in my initial impression, were the serving staff, who support the mopey hero in his schemes. Also note the English-speaking black boyfriend, who cheerfully stumbles into a cesspool of old-timey racism.

Amid the festivities, the underwhelming hero drops a bombshell of a family secret. The resultant megaton blast obliterates the mood, while the fallout infects the attendants with the radiation of moral outrage and cancerous growths of suspicion. Like America in World War II, he does this atrocity twice, to devastating effect.

Tortured metaphors aside, it can be hard to watch. The restless camera and tense atmosphere generate palpable discomfort. Not fun at all, but painfully relatable for anybody with difficulties in the family. So, nearly everybody.

A mature film, not for flashes of casual European nudity, but for an unflinching look at the precariously imbalanced mess that comprises the average family.

Recommended for family reunion absentees, unappreciated special events coordinators, and silent survivors of abuse, as a source of solace to all three.

105 minutes.