The Celebration

In 1998, this film won the Jury Prize at Cannes. It is a hard film to watch, dealing, as it does honestly and unflinchingly, with family sexual abuse, and the revelation of it within the extended family. One son, whose twin sister has just committed suicide, due, we learn later, to the emotional and psychic consequences of the childhood sexual abuse, has come to the estate of his parents for a family reunion on the occasion of his father's 60th birthday.

On the heels of his daughter's funeral, the patriarch is celebrating his birthday. His son toasts him, revealing the childhood sexual abuse he and his sister endured during and before "daddy's baths." The way that the rest of the family reacts to this bombshell is a metaphor for how real families deal with the ugliness of this in their lives. They hear the news with no visible reaction, and slowly, as the knowledge sinks in, they choose to try to silence the messenger. He is physically carried out of the room, bound, removed to the woods, beaten,  and each time he comes back and says more. He is not violent. He is simply not willing to be silent in the face of losing his sister.  He is relentless, and finally, the relentlessness of his honesty breaks down the denial and repudiation, especially in his father, who, in the end, voluntarily removes himself from the family.

This is a searing portrait of a family. The quite complicit relatives, including the grandparents, who provide a glimpse into the father's childhood (after all, where did he learn this behavior?), the silent, nervously laughing, eager-to-please wife, who pretended what she saw wasn't happening (prefigured by the grandmother's performance of a children's song in the midst of this catastrophe,) the father's original dismissal of the charge, blank-faced and calm (followed by his doppelganger father's telling of the old and inappropriate joke about the potato in the swim trunks), the uncles as a group participating in trying to silence and extricate the accuser, the rest of the family continuing to celebrate by dancing, drinking, laughing, as if nothing extraordinary has occurred--this is, writ large, how real families act when presented with the ugliness and the reality of sexual abuse within.

Danish director Thomas Vinterberg helmed this small masterpiece with great attention to detail and character development. There are small moments here that capture whole narratives in relationships. The younger son who was sent away to school, perhaps by the mother, doing for him what she did not or could not do for her older children. Interracial relationships, rebellion, appeasement--there are comments on family dynamics which make us think about the world at large--how the family is really a microcosm of human relationships everywhere, across cultures, countries, environments, and philosophies.

In the end, the title of this film becomes, not just ironic, but also a comment on the resilience of people and the flawed families in which they grow. Here, as is very necessary and appropriate, the current abuser voluntarily, because of a self-realization we fervently hope is the denouement of all such real-life scenarios, ostracizes himself.  The poisoning limb, after all, must be amputated, and then the body can heal.