Kresten's dad dies and he returns to the farm on Lolland to take care of things, including his developmentaly-challenged brother. He employs a hooker as maid. He loses his wife and job due t... Read allKresten's dad dies and he returns to the farm on Lolland to take care of things, including his developmentaly-challenged brother. He employs a hooker as maid. He loses his wife and job due to lies. The maid's kid brother moves in and they're a family of 4.Kresten's dad dies and he returns to the farm on Lolland to take care of things, including his developmentaly-challenged brother. He employs a hooker as maid. He loses his wife and job due to lies. The maid's kid brother moves in and they're a family of 4.
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The main characters are exquisitely drawn. Berthelsen plays newlywed Copenhagen yuppie Kresten, who has denied the very existence of his family in far-off (or so he thought) Lolland. Rud, his retarded brother, is brought to us with great sensitivity and charm in a show-stealing performance by Jesper Asholt. Iben Hjejle sparkles as Liva, a city prostitute with steadily mounting problems, many of which can be traced directly to her brattish younger brother Bjarke, for whom she seems to have assumed parental responsibility.
Before long (and to nobody's great surprise), we see these two pairs of siblings brought crashing together by life's twists and turns. Kresten is summoned back to Lolland in the middle of his honeymoon by news of his father's death. He soon sees that Rud is incapable of looking after himself and is forced to stay on temporarily in Lolland.
His advertisement for a housekeeper attracts Liva's attention just as she finally wears out her welcome in Copenhagen. Bjarke lasts about five minutes in the big city without her, and soon follows her to Lolland.
The interplay between these makeshift cohabitees is wonderful, particularly Rud's relationships with Kresten and Bjarke. Endless summer evenings spent in Lolland's rural idyll with these four for company will soon have you believing in crop circles and cellar-dwelling samurai heroes.
On the back of some audacious tricks to get us this far, Kragh-Jacobsen delivers a transcendent hour or so in the middle of this film that reminds me of just why I love the cinema so much.
Having created this beautiful, shimmering landscape (both emotional and physical), and reminded us that love for your family - and perhaps, in a special way, your siblings - is its own reward, the movie finds it has nowhere particular left to go. There are supporting characters - some of them reasonably well-formed, others not - but once our quartet is established and the relationships between them start to blossom, any involvement from outsiders is unwelcome, unfulfilling and only likely to bring trouble.
It's no spoiler, for I mean it purely in structural terms, when I say that we are brought to a bumpy and unsatisfying ending to this ride through the lives of four people we soon grow to care a great deal about.
For me, though, despite its shortcomings, Mifune was a beautiful movie that I'm sure I'll watch again, many times.
All characters in this film are completly different from eachother. The dialouge itself is not what makes this film great, it's the story of all these people combined.
Dogme films often show things that an American audience may have a hard time dealing with. If seeing something and learning from something that Americans can hide from is something that holds an interest than I highly recommend this film.
If it isn't a better story or more profound characters, than it is the style of filming that makes European cinema a little different from the American. And this movie has it all. The story is very good and original and the characters are very recognizable. I really got the feeling that I got to know them better, even though their lives are sometimes completely different from mine. But most important is the way everything is shot. For those who aren't familiar with the rules made up by Dogma yet, I'll give a small explanation: the director promises not to use extra light, special effects, extra sound effects... They want to make the story speak for itself and show everything in a natural and realistic way. To some this may seem like the most boring concept ever. I guess many people who like movies like The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Spiderman,... movies that are full of special effects, huge scenes and nice visual effects, may not be blown away by this movie. I know that many people may hate the concept, that many people don't want to see this kind of movies, but personally I find this a very welcome concept in a world where everybody seems to feel the need to copy what works, without being original.
Kresten has moved from a small Danish island, where his parents farm is, to Copenhagen in order to pursue an excellent career and unconcerned life. He marries his boss's daughter and is sure that he'll become the new boss as soon as his father-in-law decides to retire. But on his honeymoon he gets a phone call that his father died and that he'll have to return home. The only problem is that he has never told his wife that he had a father and a retarded brother, living together on the family farm. Once he arrives at the farm, he sees that much hasn't changed or been done since he left and he decides that they will need a housekeeper to clean up the mess. He sends an advertisement to a local newspaper and he immediately gets a reaction from Liva Psilander. Liva is a prostitute who wants to start a new life. She wants to escape from an anonymous psychopath who harasses her by phone and needs a lot of money to pay her brother Bjarke's school tuition. When Kresten's wife discovers the truth, or at least what she thinks the truth is, she breaks off the marriage and makes sure that Kresten will lose his job at her father's company and that he'll never get it back. Now Kresten will have to live together with his brother, with Livia and her little brother in the old farm on the island...
I can assure you that you'll have to get used to the way of filming at first. Perhaps you'll need two viewings to fully appreciate this movie, but once you can see past the style of filming, you'll see that this movie has a very beautiful and hearth warming subject. Personally I really liked it and that's why I give this movie at least an 8/10, even an 8.5/10.
Kresten, a young go-go company man is marrying the boss's daughter, but hides, then fabricates his country past. He doesn't get away with it for long and ends up shamed and divorced. Likewise, a young prostitute, Liva, tries to flee her surroundings, but they follow her and in the end visit - literally - wrath on her new home.
The only spiritually pure character, content in his surroundings, too innocent of wit to lie, is Kresten's retarded brother Rud. It seems that everything he says, no matter how far-fetched, turns out to be true. He is also the teacher of kindness who, since he is inarticulate, can only teach by example.
Actually, I think the most unambiguously satisfying relationship here is between Rud and Liva's beastly little brother Bjarke. It is Bjarke who can't handle the truth about himself and his sister. Quickly, the stereotypes he has learned to brutalize in the social Darwinian hell of boarding school confront him with their humanity and teach him that life doesn't have to be the daily exercise in cynicism that he and his sister suppose.
There is atonement for all three, visited in different forms, but ultimately redeeming and providing a hopeful ending to the story.
Unfortunately, there are a few problems in Mifune which marred my viewing. A major one is the text, which is badly abused in translation to English. For some reason, the translator has seen fit to turn words which in Danish mean "damn" or "hell" into "f**k". Perhaps he or she thought it would give the dialog more impact. He or she was wrong.
Another problem is the unresolved and perhaps unnecessary character of the ugly and despicable Gerner, whose purpose I'm not exactly sure of, other than as a kind of agent of punishment - perhaps a devil - descending on the hapless Kresten. In any case, we need at least to know more about him, or perhaps even have him whacked or otherwise disposed of for dramatic purposes.
Anyway, as with most European movies, "Mifune" is more about character than story. I strongly recommend that you meet Kresten, Rud, Liva and Bjarke. I think you'll like them in the end.
Did you know
- TriviaAfter the movie's completion, director Søren Kragh-Jacobsen made the following statement: "As one of the DOGME 95 brethren and co-signatory of the Vow of Chastity, I feel moved to confess to the following transgressions of the aforesaid Vow during the production of Dogme 3 - Mifune. Please note that the film has been approved as a Dogme work, as only one genuine breach of the rules has actually taken place. The rest may be regarded as moral breaches: (1) I confess to having made one take with a black drape covering a window. This is not only the addition of a property, but must also be regarded as a kind of lighting arrangement. (2) I confess to moving furniture and fittings around the house. (3) I confess to having taken with me a number of albums of my favorite comic book series as a youth, Linda & Valentin (Valérian and Laureline). (4) I confess to helping to chase the neighbor's free-range hens across our location and including them in the film. (5) I confess that I brought a photographic image from an old lady from the area and hung it in a prominent position in one scene: not as part of the plot, but more as a selfish, spontaneous, pleasurable whim. (6) I confess to borrowing a hydraulic platform from a painter, which we used for the only two bird's-eye overview shots in the film. (7) I do solemnly declare that in my presence the remainder of Dogme 3 - Mifune was produced in accordance with the vow of chastity. (8) I also point out that the film has been approved by DOGME 95 as a Dogme film, as in real terms no more than a single breach of the rules has been committed. The rest may be regarded as moral transgressions."
- Quotes
Liva Psilander: Livet er en lang lort, som man skal tage en kæmpe bid af hver dag!
- ConnectionsFeatured in Bag kameraet: Mifunes sidste sang (1999)
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- Mifune's Last Song
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- Gross US & Canada
- $512,434
- Gross worldwide
- $512,434
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