Has anyone commented on Dancer in the Dark, Lars von Trier's winning entry in this year's Cannes film festival?
I saw it the other day. It didn't do a thing for me. But my wife was crying, along with many others at the theatre. Odd. Though perhaps not inexplicable.
If you can swallow an extremely schmaltzy plot (I mean, exaggeratedly, exceedingly, extremely schmaltzy), you will be able to be touched by Björk, the Icelandic singer and lead actress, and her weird Alice-in-Wonderland-with-an-introvert-artistic-twist-like music and songs. Especially if you happen to like musicals. (Which I don't - I've never understood the point of them).
Afterwards when I discussed the movie with my wife and my sister-in-law, I was made to feel like such a cynic, and they were deeply provoked by my comments, especially the sis. Which was completely unintended.
The difference was: They saw fit to somehow buy the banalities, or disregard them. Interesting. I've always thought that the line "either you love it or you hate it" was an unimaginative cliché. But this film seems to have confounded that view.
And I am not beyond weeping over films. No, sir, I sob with the best of them over sometimes embarrassingly banal movies. And one inducer of sto-tears was in fact Lars von Trier's earlier opus Breaking the Waves.
Strange...
