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It's fitting that his first remark during our interview in San Francisco should be a quip about identity. The hero of his film, the amazing Kresten (Anders W. Berthelsen), is a Copenhagen businessman who skyrockets to the top -- and to the altar with the boss's daughter -- partly by lying about his past. Kresten tells his new family that he has no family. But on the morning after his wedding, he learns that his very real father has just died. He leaves his luxury honeymoon suite for a dilapidated farm on Denmark's southernmost island, Lolland.

The movie's combination of high-stakes wedlock and covert tawdriness couldn't be more timely. Kresten wants to be a millionaire and marry a multimillionairess. When he practices martial-arts moves on a hotel rooftop, he comes off as one more would-be warrior tycoon.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

But in remote Lolland, as he arranges for his dad's funeral and for the care of his mentally impaired elder brother, Rud (Jesper Asholt), what's left of his former family life transforms him. The title of the movie is a reference to Japanese film star Toshiro Mifune, from "The Seven Samurai" -- he is Rud's favorite actor. Kresten finds true love -- and his true self -- after he hires a housekeeper named Liva (Iben Hjejle) to look after Rud. But first come brutal complications involving Liva's preppie rebel brother and her hidden past as a call girl.

In its own unassuming yet cheeky way, this film outlines the emptiness of upward mobility in an age of unapologetic capitalism. It earned a Silver Bear (second prize) at last year's Berlin Film Festival. But Kragh-Jacobsen says that he didn't make this film (in Danish, with English subtitles) with an eye toward the global marketplace. "Mifune" is the third production of the Dogma Collective, aka Dogma '95 -- a group of filmmakers who aim to rattle the bourgeois complacency of the Danish film world and refute the pyrotechnics of world cinema. Like "Breaking the Waves" auteur Lars Von Trier (who made the Dogma film "The Idiots") and Thomas Vinterberg (who made the Dogma film "The Celebration"), the director took "The Vow of Chastity" for "Mifune." He swore to shoot only on location, use a handheld camera and record all sound and music at the same time as the images. The 10 rules that make up the Vow can be found at www.dogme95.dk. They're meant to focus each director on contemporary subjects without "superficial" action or artistic self-indulgence.

Kragh-Jacobsen admits that the Vow of Chastity was designed to churn up attention. "In a small country, you have to invent something just to stay on the map. And if you want to keep a local audience -- if you want make them get out of the house, leave the chair and the TV, hire a babysitter, pay $10 and take a taxi -- you need to shake them up a bit, surprise them." But Dogma's dictates also came as a relief. On Kragh-Jacobsen's last picture, a fable of childhood in the Holocaust called "The Island on Bird Street" (1996), he held to a stately style and jousted with producers about "fitting it out to suit the audience" with romantic music. He wanted to regain the spontaneity he had when he started out in the '70s and, with "Mifune," make a film with "no producer interference, no script doctors, no test audiences."

Although Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg are Dogma's founders, Kragh-Jacobsen is its elder statesman. He remembers teaching a film class 15 years ago and seeing Von Trier in the room "with his back to me, listening to a yellow Walkman." Ten years go, he sat on a film school committee that admitted Thomas at age 19. Kragh-Jacobsen is friendly with both of them: He admires their chutzpah and their filmmaking. "Lars is sarcastic, funny and a wonderful person -- an extremely good filmmaker, whether you like his films or not. He's certainly fantastic in the way he promotes film, and in his experiments, in the way he thinks.

"And Thomas inspired me with 'The Celebration' [the international art-house hit that Time Out aptly described as Buņuel meets 'Fanny and Alexander']. He's 30 years old and has all this anger. He made a wonderful movie about disconnecting a family. I'm 22 years older, and I'm a true believer in family. I've had the same wife for many years and have two grown-up kids, including one who's been in the U.S. for four months. But I believe in different constellations of family. I have lots of friends who live with kids from a first marriage, and then have one together, or have their own mother living with them, or have grandchildren living together with their own youngest children. I love these kinds of families; that's why, in 'Mifune,' I found it extremely funny to make a family out of these odd couples."

Next page | "I wanted to show the different colors of Dogma"