Director: Lars von Trier
"I was thinking in more opera terms. Opera is more like melodrama. The problem about a musical is that it's a little hard to swallow that suddenly they're like dum-dee-dee-dum-dum. This is always a little difficult. Whereas in on opera, they play all the time. But a more honorable way to do it, the way I have done, is to use her imagination to go in and out of it." Director Lars Von Trier from IndieWire
Dancer in the Dark directed by Danish wunderkind Lars von Trier is as fabulously unique as it is maddeningly contrived. It has been the talk of the film world since it took home the Palme D'or at Cannes last May. Now audiences will have to decide whether it deserved that coveted award or whether Cannes was just being political as usual.
What is impressive about Dancer in the Dark are its anti-musical musical numbers and its innovative use of multiple video cameras that were used to tape each scene. At the center it has a worthy performance by Bjork – who Catherine Deneuve said doesn’t know how to act but knows how to "be." – and an occasional hard edge both in form (via crude video) and content. The movie does nothing if not drag you into a deep dark contrived place along with its heroine for two-and-a-half-hours.
Selma is a single working class mother who lives in a rundown old house owned by a policeman and his wife - who occupy the house in front of hers. Selma has a degenerative eye disease and she is slowly going blind. She doesn't tell anyone for fear of losing her job and she refuses any help from anyone; instead sacrificing herself by working long hours to earn enough money to pay for an eye operation for her son – who unknowingly shares the same eye disease.
Selma is a mess and as the film goes on more and more bad circumstances befall her. To make matters worse she kills her landlord and (unbelievably) refuses legal council and is sent to prison where she waits for her execution.
Despite some of the most unique musical sequences in the history of movies the story itself is nothing more than just a kitchy teary-eyed melodrama. As far as plot and performance is concerned von Trier hardly improves on the work done by D.W. Griffith and other silent film directors. Upon closer inspection too the film has many plot gaps, is overly dramatic and at times has glaringly nonsensical contrivances that dangle on nothing but the faith that the audience will fall for it.
A big part of the problem is von Trier's fascination with the martyrdom of women. As Amy Taubin rightly points out in her review von Trier watched Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc at too early an age and hasn’t yet recovered. Ultimately (not unlike Breaking the Waves), this is just another film about a woman who suffers for no reason other than that the director wants it that way.
As a general rule when a director asks an audience to suspend disbelief for a comedy or a thriller most audiences will oblige for the sake of the movie. But when a filmmaker asks us to suspend disbelief for a tragedy they better be good enough to pull it off. Ingmar Berman (Cries and Whispers) and the team of Powell & Pressburger (The Red Shoes) come to mind as directors who could pull off a lot because they had the skill to take us into suffering of their characters while keeping an artistic distance. Lars von Trier doesn’t (in my opinion) have their talent yet he pushes the tragedy full throttle.
Part of the reason is that von Trier manipulates his message and expects the audience to take the ride while Bergman and Powell & Pressburger kept an intellectual distance letting us see the tragedies without asking us to drown in them.
There is no doubt that some who will cry buckets while watching this film. But there are many more who will just sit back, take it in and at about 90 minutes start looking at their watches.
Still, there are unforgettable scenes of brilliance; such as when she sings a song with a man she has just killed - a scene that may qualify for the most unique song sequence in movie history - and later when Bjork wails into the prison air conditioner unit. But it’s not enough because these scenes are mere window dressing to the overall ham-fisted tragedy.
-Matt Langdon
CLICK HERE to read what critics are really saying about the film.
