Lovers – Dogme 5

Finally, the wheels fall off the Dogme 95 bandwagon. Although he acted for von Trier in Europa and Breaking the Waves, Barr is the first director from outside the founding group of Danish collaborators to be awarded their Dogme seal of authenticity. Here the no-frills proscription is only too evident in the final product, where the hand-held digital camerawork seems so murky it almost looks like amateur holiday footage. Not that the storyline is anything radical either, a case of the love-that-cannot-be when Parisian bookshop assistant Bouchez meets Serbian artist and illegal immigrant Trifunovic. As in The Dream Life of Angels, she is radiance personified, yet powerless in the face of a story which reveals the fine line between classic romance and banal cliché. Barr whirls the camera feverishly. Terribly wearing.