Film: Chastity begins at home

Amid the superficial excesses of the Cannes Film Festival, Geoffrey Macnab finds two film-makers taking it a little too seriously

The Danes are coming! This was the message that filtered through to Cannes earlier this week as the notoriously neurotic Lars von Trier, who hates flying, wended his way across Europe in a camper van. It took him four days to reach the festival, where his new film The Idiots was screening in competition.

While they awaited his arrival, festivalgoers scrutinised the extraordinary Russ Meyer-like stills from the film (a woman smearing mayonnaise over her breasts, two men running naked through the woods) and pondered the manifesto that von Trier had drawn up with his compatriot, the 30-year- old Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (who also has a film in competition.) The Vow Of Chastity is a 10-point document full of high-minded, movie brattish sentiment. "The film must be in colour", "the camera must be hand-held", and "the director must not be credited", are just some of the pronouncements.

There is something quaint and a little old-fashioned about the document. Not since the 1960s, when Truffaut and co railed against "Le Cinema Du Papa," have any group of European filmmakers had the gumption and self- importance to form a movement.

Vinterberg's film Festen ("Family Feast") screened earlier in the week. It's a curdled family melodrama, bleak but mordantly funny. A respectable- seeming patriarch celebrates his 60th birthday with family and friends, but over the course of an anguished evening, we learn that he is a child abuser who drove one of his daughters to suicide. Vinterberg captures brilliantly the queasy, uncomfortable intimacy of the family gathering gone wrong.

In person, over a hurried lunch on the terrace of the Grand Hotel, Vinterberg is not at all what his publicity (and indeed his film) have led you to expect. For an angry young Dane, he is remarkably sanguine. "I must disappoint you... I grew up in a commune among hippies and naked people with a lot of love," he says when asked whether his own background was as bleak as that shown in the film.

"The film comes from my sick head, but not from my family." Whereas von Trier (for some years now the oldest "brat" in world cinema) looks as dishevelled as Fassbinder in his dog days, Vinterberg is cheerful, polite and almost aggressively normal. "I don't suffer from these same kind of diseases as Lars," he reflects, "because I guess I'm a bit more healthy than he is."

To the untrained eye, it looks as if Vinterberg is breaking the rules of the Vow of Chastity every time he turns on the camera in Festen. The manifesto forbids trick shots, but the film seems full of them. Vinterberg doesn't like the accusation. "The camera was the size of this sandwich," he protests, holding up a chicken-filled baguette from which, a moment before, he had taken a large bite. He then begins to wave the sandwich around, imitating camera movements.

There is one scene, he confesses, in which he used Scotch tape to attach the camera to the boom. "I guess that's a break of the rules," he shrugs. "That's not really a hand-held shot - it's only semi hand-held - but that's one shot out of 700."

Quizzed as to whether his actors enjoyed having the camera thrust so close to them, Vinterberg admits they did not. "But the cameraman was very good with them, very intimate." During the feast scenes, all 50 actors in the cast were present all the time. The manifesto insists on filming on location and also demands that "sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa" This meant that even when any one actor is giving a monologue, there are always 49 of his colleagues making a din in the background. Orchestrated chaos, it seems, is fundamental to the manifesto.

Festen has been widely admired by the European critics, but, as ever, von Trier has managed to divide opinion. Trumping Breaking The Waves was always going to tax even his abilities. Idiots, he announced before he arrived, was a film "by idiots, about idiots, for idiots". Several critics called it quite idiotic - they could hardly do otherwise. Still, no-one can deny von Trier's ability to fashion an epigram. "Idiocy," the Scandinavian sage pronounced, "is like hypnosis and ejaculation; if you want it, you cannot have it - and if you do not want it, you can."

Von Trier apart, the main talking point at the festival has been the last-minute cancellation of the special screening of Orson Welles' Touch Of Evil. It somehow seems apt; as every Welles' fan knows, his career was full of abandoned projects. Universal themselves treated the director pretty monstrously, only allowing him to direct Touch Of Evil because they didn't want to upset its star, Charlton Heston.

Ironically, the villain of the piece this time around isn't the big, bad studio. It's Orson's own daughter, Beatrice Welles, who had threatened the festival with legal action if it went ahead with the screening of the newly edited version of her father's film. What she objects to is not quite clear. Perhaps it's the fact that the character her father plays in the movie, a jowly, big-bellied cop who likes nothing better than persecuting Mexicans, is far from sympathetic. Reportedly, the film has been re-cut in accordance with the late Mr Welles's wishes. One thing is for certain: were Welles still around today, he'd relish being back at the centre of a good old-fashioned Cannes controversy.

the vow of chastity

1 Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found).

2 The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is shot).

3 The camera must be hand-held. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. (The film must not take place where the camera is standing; shooting must take place where the film takes place).

4 The film must be in colour. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure, the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera).

5 Optical work and filters are forbidden.

6 The film must not contain superficial action (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)

7 Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden (That is, the film takes place here and now).

8 Genre movies are not acceptable.

9 Film format is Academy 35mm.

10 The director must not be credited. Furthermore, I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all means available and at the cost of any good taste and aesthetic considerations."