Mifune

Herald rating: * *

Cast: Anders W. Berthelsen, Iben Hjejle, Jesper Asholt, Emil Tarding

Director: Soren Kragh-Jacobsen

Rating: M

Running time: 100 minutes

Opens: Thursday, Rialto cinemas

Review: Peter Calder

Brutal and often brutally funny, this odd cross between a black comedy and an old-fashioned love story is the third officially sanctioned film made according to the Dogma 95 code (two films by Dogma's founders, Thomas Vinterberg's brilliant and corrosive The Celebration and Lars Von Trier's messy and faintly sick The Idiots, are the others).

The Dogma code, conceived as a way of stripping the veneer of artifice from film and getting at the emotional truth of its storytelling, requires among other things hand-held camera, music recorded real-time on location and the absence of artificial lighting.

Kragh-Jacobsen's film observes these tenets with mostly due diligence (his confession of several specific transgressions in accompanying notes is almost surrealistically serious-minded) but the film he comes up with is oddly conventional.

Mifune is a story of a man whose obsession with material success has been built on a lie and who discovers, through a process almost as gruelling for us as it is for him, the healing power of love.

Kresten (Berthelsen) is a yuppie Copenhagen businessman whose marriage to the boss' daughter seems, even at first sight, a calculated career move.

The charming fiction that he has no family has helped to sustain his ascent to wealth and power but it all comes crashing down around his ears on his first morning of wedlock when he gets a phone call summoning him home to an island backwater where his father lies dead, decked out on the dining-room table. Under that table is Rud (Asholt), his halfwit brother.

In parallel, we meet Liva (Hjejle), a prostitute sacked by her pimp and tormented by a telephone stalker. When she answers Kresten's advertisement for a housekeeper, the film sets up a maacélange agrà quatre (they are joined by Liva's young brother, expelled from school) whose members are on a collision course from the minute they meet.

What transpires is predictable, at times almost hackneyed, but the abrasively realistic storyline is narrated with a surprising sweetness.

The title derives from the late, great Japanese screen hero Toshiro Mifune, a Kurosawa regular, who is a fantasy figure in the brothers' games. (Comically, Rud remembers Mifune's great role as being in The Seven Samovar). The relevance of the title remains elusive even at the film's end - as does the meaning of the original Danish title which translates as Mifune's Last Song.