Dancer in the Dark

Directed by Lars von Trier
Written by Lars von Trier
Starring Björk, Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, Peter Stormare
Denmark/France/Sweden, 2000
Rated R (some violence, adult material)

A-

GIVING IN
Anytime you become someone whose work is to observe and analyze the world or culture, such as a critic or a philosopher, you are at risk of becoming a person who denies enjoyment of the kitschy, who tries not to respond to bourgeois pleasures. Throughout Dancer in the Dark, which is ridiculously, almost sadistically melodramatic, I was deeply aware of writer-director Lars von Trier's brutal use of sappy mechanisms, and probably tried to distance myself from it all. The film turned out to be irresistible. It's impossible not to feel something, not to feel overwhelmingly moved by it, and after you leave the theater, part of you wants to kick yourself for giving in to the director's emotional bullying; he so obviously wants a reaction from you, and he wants a big tear-drops-and-hankie reaction.

Dancer in the Dark, which is my first von Trier film (therefore, I cannot, to my shame, compare it to Breaking the Waves, which it is supposedly very similar to), is one of the most successful melodramas I've seen in quite a while. Movies like Stepmom only elicit skepticism from audiences who are conscious of the Hollywood machinery; the films are about as creative as paint-by-number pictures. This movie is pretty insincere; von Trier, who is known as quite the egotist, seems more focused on showing off his technical skills than forming breathing characters and real situations. But the film isn't about reality at all, even though von Trier and his cast seem to think it is whenever they talk about it in interviews. We’re sucked into the movie because its plot (about female martyrdom that's given the significance of the story of Joan of Arc) is so distinctively preposterous and the film is photographed with the graininess of digital video, which makes it feel as if it were filmed reality.

Selma, played by the great Icelandic-pixie pop singer Björk, escapes the harshness of reality by imagining herself in a musical. She lives for Busby Berkeley and 42nd Street. Lured by these romantic visions of America, this Czech immigrant, who’s nearly blind and is trying to keep a tiresome job at a factory, is saving up to get her son an operation because he will also go blind without it. But she cannot help daydreaming while being hypnotized by the sounds in the factory and her obsession with the pretty fantasies contained in the musicals.

The musical numbers in the film revolve around songs that aren't even close to sounding like the classics of Tin Pan Alley, but they're exhilarating and beautiful nonetheless and are the highlights of the movie, especially when they appear after overlong exposition. Björk has crafted some of her best songs for the film, utilizing throbbing, sometimes industrial textures; "I've Seen It All" is truly moving, with an intensely photographed sequence to accompany it, and "Scatterheart" starts off hauntingly lullabyish, and then becomes desperately emotional, with a constantly repeated refrain of "you only did what you had to do..." The cinematography of the numbers is obviously influenced by Jacques Demy musicals and Björk's own video "It's Oh So Quiet" (directed by Spike Jonze), but it's darker and more menacing. Björk has one of the most uniquely beautiful voices in modern alternative pop; it has equal amounts of timidity and elegance, and I think it was Bono who rightly compared it to an ice pick. She has a quaintness that makes her turn work (the whole film rests on her shoulders), though I think her performance is not as naturalistic as some say. It's just a shame that the still-very-chic Catherine Deneuve, who plays one of Selma’s few friends in America, was given such an underwritten role. Peter Stormare makes up for this mistake by being unusually tender as a guy with a creepy crush on the heroine.

Dancer in the Dark is about how important musicals are, or maybe it's about how criminally misleading they are. Anyone who bashes Hollywood musicals is too high-minded for cinema; ducking into a dark room to be smothered by a succession of images is always a form of escape, and I still believe it should entertain, or at least compel, or bore for a good reason. Dancer in the Dark pays tribute to the dead genre of the musical, and even features an (unnecessary) overture. The Hollywood musicals are about the Ideal America, the way things are supposed to be. Mousy Selma discovers, in an outrageous turn of events, that reality is depressingly different from her illusion. However, von Trier's message rings false because his version of Reality is so unreal.

But Dancer in the Dark is also a loving/despising tribute to the Hollywood melodrama and how transporting it can be. Probably the most blatant act of tear-jerking in the film is an undeniably spellbinding (yet shameful) scene of Selma singing "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music while locked up in a jail cell. According to critic Godfrey Cheshire, the Danish auteur shows us that he can create a reality that is so irrational, even stupid, and he can still get to us. (The film is not all gloom-and-doom, though; it has a few darkly witty moments of comedy that jab at America’s fear of Communism and the foolishness of our legal system.) Von Trier has made a film with European techniques, like his own aesthetically-valid-and-theoretically-worthless Dogme 95 style, but it is really a Hollywood film posing as an art film. It’s exciting to experience and resuscitates, with touches of queasiness and moments of beauty, two kinds of movies that Hollywood seems to have forgotten how to make.

By Andrew Chan [OCT. 14, 2000]

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