Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Mifune
1999 · Søren Kragh-Jacobsen · Mifune on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for a complete absence of added music under any scene. (sound)
Dogme's rules forbid a non-diegetic score, so any music in the film must be sung or played within the world itself, not added afterward.
Payoff: Nothing swells to tell you how to feel about what you are seeing.
Notice the handheld camera following actors through real rooms. (camera)
Mantle shoots with natural light and a mobile, reactive camera that takes advantage of weather and open landscape rather than dictating the actors' movement.
Payoff: The image looks caught rather than composed, even in scenes built for the shot.
Notice the farmhouse's actual clutter standing in for set design. (setting)
With no constructed sets allowed, the run-down farm's real disrepair does the work a production designer would normally do, signaling poverty and neglect.
Payoff: Nothing here was decorated to mean something. It already meant something before the camera arrived.
Watch the cut from the city wedding to the muddy farm. (staging)
A pressed, well-lit wedding gives way hard to rain and mud, with no music to announce that one world is false and the other true.
Payoff: The film stages a fall from a polished self into something rougher and more honest.
Watch Rud's games and devotions, unhurried and simply observed. (performance)
The camera follows Kresten's intellectually disabled brother in long, reactive takes rather than cutting around him, letting his presence carry the scene.
Payoff: Duration itself becomes the feeling here, with no line of dialogue doing the work. In the reading: cinema of the body. The reading calls this cinema of the body: duration carried by a body's habits, not by a line advancing the plot.
Once you have seen it
Watch Liva step off the bus and become someone else. (structure)
A Copenhagen call girl arrives to play a rural housekeeper, and the honest, unembellished camera simply keeps filming her invented self without judging it.
Payoff: The lie is not exposed here. It is patiently allowed to grow into a life. In the reading: fabulation / story-telling (legending). The reading calls this fabulation: a person caught building a self she does not yet have the right to.
Watch the derelict farm rise back up once the father dies. (setting)
Kresten's polished Copenhagen life falls away the moment he returns home, the buried origins surfacing through the floorboards of the place he fled.
Payoff: Homecoming here just means the thing he buried finally showing through the surface. In the reading: derived milieu / originary world. The reading calls the farm a derived milieu: the originary life surfacing beneath the polish he built on top of it.
Watch Kresten play the samurai to protect and distract his brother. (performance)
He performs a Mifune-style warrior for Rud throughout the film, a game that turns into the clearest expression of his care.
Payoff: Protection here looks like play, not like anything you would usually call heroism.
Watch how the pretending in this film turns into the truth. (structure)
Liva's invented housekeeper and Kresten's buried farm boy both start as performances and end the film as the people they actually are.
Payoff: The honest camera never catches them lying. It watches the lie ripen into something real.
Carry this in: Watch the brother's body when no one is performing for anyone else in the room.