This festival darling and Denmark’s entry to the 2000 Oscars is a sweet tale of unlikely people bonding together to form an oddly cohesive family unit.  Mifune would be easy to overlook if it were not for the fact that it is the third film created using the limiting covenants of Dogme 95, a filmmaking aesthetic created nearly five years ago by Danish directors Lars von Trier (Breaking the Waves) and Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration).

 Among the restrictions in Dogme’s “Vow of Chastity,” to which each director must swear allegiance, are the forbidding of the use of props, sets, artificial light and sound (including music).  The scenes must be shot sequentially on a hand-held camera and must not contain any superficial action.  The opening and closing credits were hand-written on a discolored, cracked wall, which isn’t a Dogme rule, but still looked damn cool regardless.

Mifune is set in modern-day Copenhagen, where we find Kresten (Anders W. Berthelsen) marrying Claire (Sofie Gråbøl), the daughter of his wealthy boss.  The film quickly shifts from emotional wedding toasts to the honeymoon bed, which includes one of the most violent woman-on-top sex scenes that I’ve ever seen.  The following morning, Kresten is awakened by a phone call relaying the message that his estranged father has died.  Although he hasn’t spoken to his dad for ten years, Kresten leaves his pouty bride behind to tie up the loose ends of his family’s estate.

Maybe “loose ends” isn’t a strong enough description.  For one, the estate consists of an isolated, rundown farmhouse.  Then there’s Rud (Jesper Asholt), Kresten’s mentally challenged brother that isn’t responsible enough to care for himself.  After making the funeral arrangements, Kresten must find someone to look after his nose-picking brother.  He places an ad in the paper and hires Liva (Iben Hjejle), a prostitute from an upscale call-girl service that’s on the run from both her pimp, with whom she has fallen out of favor, and a series of creepy obscene phone calls.  

Both brothers are immediately smitten with the lovely Liva, who resembles Robin Wright Penn but has a better rack.  Soon, Liva’s snotty little brother Bjarke (Emil Tarding) joins the mix after being expelled from school.  “We three are a bunch of loonies,” Kresten admits, despite the fact that the four housemates seem to gel together after a short period of unrest - they have little but each other to hold on to.  In particular, Kresten and Liva are happy to be accepted without being judged by their pasts (farming and hooking).

 Already having garnered accolades at several major film festivals, as well as nabbing three European Film Awards (for Hjejle, Asholt and Best Picture), Mifune certainly looks better than the previous two Dogme films (The Celebration and the yet-to-be-released The Idiots), but its story is also a lot more predictable, which is strange since the Dogme rules were enacted because of the boring unoriginality of modern films.  The picture is undoubtedly more colorful that its predecessors, using more outdoor scenes and effectively capturing the golden wheat and green alfalfa, as well as the orangy interiors.  Søren Kragh-Jacobsen’s camera work won’t make you dizzy, like previous films using handheld cameras (i.e., The Blair Witch Project).  Like other Dogme films, the acting is terrific, especially Asholt and Hjejle, the latter of whom will next be seen starring opposite John Cusack in High Fidelity.

 For you film buffs, the name Mifune comes from actor Toshirô Mifune, who appeared in over a dozen of Akira Kurosawa’s films, including Yojimbo, The Seven Samurai and Red Beard.  Years ago, Kresten convinced Rud that the great samurai was living in the basement of their home; a revelation that both terrified and excited Rud into doing whatever his brother wanted.

 1:38 - for strong sexuality and language, and for some violence