Dogmatic dexterity

Mifune(15) Mifune is the third film to have been made under the Dogme manifesto drawn up by Danish film-makers in the spring of 1995.

The rules - including a stipulation that all camera work must be handheld and a prohibition on the use of artificial light - seem wildly arbitrary, if not a little barmy.

But there's method behind the madness: the manifesto was meant to encourage a year-zero kind of film-making. It was meant to knock away the technical crutches directors so often rely upon and to force them - in the words of the manifesto itself - to concentrate on getting the truth out of their characters and setting.

The jury's still out on this one, but one thing's for sure: the first two films to carry the Dogme stamp of approval - Lars von Trier's The Idiots and Thomas Vinterberg's Festen - were brave, stimulating and unsettling works.

Perhaps a little intimidated by the efforts of his fellow Dogme signatories, Mifune director Sren Kragh-Jacobsen has gone to the other extreme. A sweet, rather gentle little movie, Mifune is as likely to upset delicate sensibilities as weak tea. It follows Copenhagen yuppie Kresten, who returns to his rural childhood home to look after his simpleton brother Rud.

Unable to cope with the domestic chores, Kresten takes on prostitute-on-the-run Liva as a housekeeper and - guess what? - falls in love with her. It's not quite Pretty Woman - but by the same token there aren't the harsh, challenging undertones which made Vinterberg and von Trier's films so affecting.

Sure, there are moments in this film of striking originality: an utterly beguiling scene, for instance, where Liva and her obnoxious little brother (who makes Harry Enfield's truculent adolescent Kevin seem like a model in childly saintliness) patronise one of Rud's simple-minded friends, only to be blown away by his virtuosity on the guitar.

Then there's a confidently staged finale which daringly switches from Straw Dogs-style melodrama to a farce revolving around a case of mistaken identity - and also a nice, unhurried tempo to the developing relationship between Kresten and the emotionally scarred Liva, which recalls this year's other arthouse romance between a prostitute and a yokel bachelor, The Polish Bride.

But what you're left wondering throughout this solid, well-made movie is why Jacobsen went to the bother of doing it Dogme-style in the first place. Where von Trier and Vinterberg's film's rough, camcorder-originated images leant their stories a grubby authenticity, Mifune - shot on film - is visually quite unremarkable.

What Mifune does share with its Dogme predecessors, however, is an isolated location: just as Festen took place over the course of a weekend in a country house, and The Idiots stuck determinedly within the hermetic world of its commune of situationist pranksters, most of Mifune unfurls in a farmhouse miles from civilisation. It's tempting to draw parallels here between the themes of isolation that connect these three films and the (self-imposed) position of the Dogme film-makers themselves.

But in the end Mifune is a different beast. With von Trier and Vinterberg you got the sense that they delighted in the challenge the Dogme rules presented them: it was almost like the film-making equivalent of a right-hander using a pen with his left hand just to see what happened. With Jacobsen, however, Dogme seems to be another kind of challenge altogether: he's out to prove he can write just as neatly with his left as with his right.

Edward Lawrenson

Copyright 1999
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