Festen Time with my Family Spoilers

I never turn off my pretentiousness. I may, on occasion, modulate it a bit to accommodate the situation, but it's always on.

There have been times, many times actually, when not being so pretentious could have saved me a lot of embarrassment. If you could graph my life and follow my pretentiousness and my social standing, the moments of the highest in terms of the former are followed by lowest of the low in terms of the latter.

One such occasion happened a couple of years ago, around Christmas time. The family gathered around the TV, drinks in hand, snacks aplenty, eagerly discussing which movie we'd watch. Since they all know I'm "into movies", my opinion sometimes carries more weight than it should.

Believing myself a film connoisseur, I started ruminating. Comedies are the way to go with family movie nights, as you don't want to get super depressing or bored. But what type of comedy? I didn't want no Kevin Hart or Melissa McCarthy stinker, I wanted that good shit. That pretentious shit. Even that Dogme 95 shit.

I was vaguely aware of Festen. Well-received dark comedy about a family reunion. That was, basically, all I knew about it. I love a good movie about a family getting together where shit hits the fan, and I thought I'd enlighten my own gathered family with a modern classic.

Movie taste is never without risk. The seemingly simple act of recommending a film carries with it a lot, and being responsible for family movie night is just another version of the same problem. You control the room, the mood, the experience itself. You end up feeling entitled to impose your taste on your family.

Also, this being a capital F Film instead of a movie meant that I would be shielded from judgement because of its weirdness. What a fool I was.

The decision was locked in. I downed my drink and poured myself another one as my dad put the disk in the DVD tray. As the night progressed and things got awkward, I would keep pouring myself more drinks.

My dad doesn't like movies without guns or fights, so forcing him to watch a Dogme 95 film in Danish was the complete antithesis of what he'd prefer for a movie night. Still, out of some christmassy sense of familial duty, he watched along.

We are not prudes in my family. I can sit next to them and watch a movie with a couple of boobs or dicks flopping around (just for a few seconds), as long as I feel the story calls for it and the result is somewhat funny. I will be uncomfy, and so will they, but that's part of being an adult.

What I can't do, and I don't think I'm alone here, is entertain certain ideas around my parents. Some deep, shocking, bleak ideas. Consider this foreshadowing.

I say this so you understand that, under normal circumstances, Festen wouldn't be a big deal. But the holidays, watching it with my parents, my eagerness in forcing them to watch this movie. All of this taken together made the experience worse than it needed to be.

Spoilers ahead.

In Festen, a rich family gets together to celebrate the patriarch's 60th birthday at his hotel. Among many rich and influential guests, we get the three children of the family: Christian, the older brother, who is depressed and dealing with some dark stuff. Michael, the youngest one, an abusive ass. Helen, the middle child, a singer who has traveled all around the world. There was a fourth child, Christian's twin, but she committed suicide before the story began, so all we get of her is her shadow looming over everyone.

Let me tell you, the first few minutes were rough. Not a lot of jokes, and not a lot of context about what's going on. Characters arrive, we hear their names once, and then we jump around to introduce another set of characters. The cinematography and editing in this film are rapid-fire; combine that with the Dogme 95 aesthetic and handheld camera, and you get some shots that, at least in my mind, belong in a 90s skate video. Particularly in the first act, when all the characters are running around the house and there's a lot of movement, it truly evokes that sensation. Still, my family gave me the benefit of the doubt.

I could tell they wanted "something to happen". Oh boy, did something happen. The whole film hinges on this crucial scene: during dinner, Christian gets up to deliver a speech. It starts nice enough, but then turns incredibly dark when he accuses his father of raping him and his twin sister when they were kids.

I was shocked on two fronts. One being the narrative twist, which I quite liked. Two being that my family clearly had feelings about this twist. Audible gasps and groans, but still nothing turned into words. For my anxious little mind, this meant they were clearly judging me, not the movie or the characters, but me, because I had chosen the film.

But, like the film itself, the festivities carried on without a hiccup. In Festen, the rest of the family and the guests don't believe Christian, or they simply don't want to deal with it, so the party goes on, although everyone's a bit uncomfy with it. The same scene played out in the living room with my family.

My mom did everything in her power not to look at me. All my life I've associated being uncomfortable with looking away. So, logically, staring at someone dead in the eye means I'm comfortable, and they should be as well. I conveyed this by staring at my mother as Christian told the world the unspeakable things his father did. It's a very particular feeling when your own mother doesn't want to look you in the eye, one I recommend for your next Christmas gathering.

The rest of the evening followed the same formula. Just like the guests in the movie, my family kept getting drunker and drunker (so did I), and they stopped acknowledging my presence. They did whatever they could to create distance. I did the same thing, but in a different direction. I created scenarios in my head where I'd defend myself from their snarky comments. I was deeply aware of how I was ruining movie night, but I was never going to accept that. After all, my movie pick was defensible, as indicated by the laurel wreath on the DVD box. A flimsy defense, yes, but the only one available to me.

I thought that after Christian accusing his father of raping him a few times without my family saying anything, I was in the clear. The end was near, and my family's judgment of me hadn't been verbalized, which I considered a victory.

Near the end of the film, a drunk Michael confronts his father. He starts the movie seeking his approval, but his world has turned upside down by this point. So Michael does the only sensible thing and he beats the shit out of his father. On its own, this wasn't too much, but context. Context always gets you. My family couldn't take it anymore.

"Why did you pick this?", my dad said. He was more annoyed than anything else.

I adopted the same strategy as the patriarch of the family: I chose silence and to keep things moving along. Like him, I controlled the room. I knew silence would protect me, the same way it had protected him.

In a way, I wanted to educate them. But cinephilia shares some of the same pervertedness as other philias, and you can't just spring it on others without consent. Family Dogme 95 movie night was never going to work, but I was too blinded by pretentiousness to see that.

In the end, the silence was broken. There was no big moment of catharsis. I simply excluded myself from the living room, again copying the strategy of the father in the film. I didn't defend myself or the movie. And my family stayed there, eating and drinking, eager to forget the whole thing.