Dancer in the Dark

Lars von Trier is a mechanic, not an artist. And his movies are meat grinders he feeds his characters through...
By Stephanie Zacharek Sept. 22, 2000

In filmmaking, as in life, ineptitude is forgivable. Ineptitude coupled with arrogance is not. In mechanics and technical skills, Lars von Trier is the kind of director who cares more about his own paltry vision than about his audience. He's a director who refuses to put the camera in logical places, who lets it swing and wobble woozily, who prefers film stock that makes his picture surface look like it has been soaked in dirty dishwater for three days. His technique is supposed to be a kind of purity: He's a founder of Dogme '95, a school of filmmaking that decries movie "tricks" (you know, things like shooting in focus) as being manipulative and untruthful and holds directors to an unforgiving slate of unities of time and place and the like. (Only some of his films hold strictly to these precepts, however.) In his ruthless pursuit of honesty, von Trier makes his audience work overtime to fill in the dots between his lapses and misconnections, to add imaginary color where he has neglected to put any, to maintain alertness across the prairie-plains indolence of his storytelling. In other words, if we're bored, it's our own damn fault. Dancer in the Dark Directed by Lars von Trier Starring Björk, Catherine Deneuve, Peter Stormare to find it again Von Trier has been directing features, shorts and TV series since the late '70s, but he didn't gain international attention until the 1996 "Breaking the Waves," a logy, depressing parable about faith and sex shot in faded colors with a wobbly, weaving camera. The lead character, Bess (Emily Watson is an unstable young woman who's gradually destroyed by love and her own libido and is finally punished for her sins of the flesh. Von Trier has a predilection for tales of misery and heartache informed by hoary mores that represent the worst of the Victorian age. He's also guilty of unabashed sadism toward his characters (and we think he delights in making us suffer) and a very thinly disguised contempt for -- or, perhaps worse, pity toward -- women. "Breaking the Waves" is generally said to have been acclaimed, but for every critic who slavered over it, there seemed to be at least three who took arms against it. With "Waves," von Trier's crimes were already stacked a mile high; with "Dancer in the Dark," his tall tower of insolence topples with a hollow clatter. The film is a numbing, nearly three-hour musical about a factory worker named Selma (Icelandic singer Björk, in her motion-picture debut) who's losing her sight and is struggling to save for the operation her son needs to rescue him from the same fate. Selma loves musicals -- she's delighted to have been cast in a local community theater production of "The Sound of Music," even though she can't come in on cue or carry the tunes. Selma loves musicals so much that she lives her life as if she were eternally locked in one: At the factory where she works, the heavy chug-chug of machinery arranges itself into hypnotic rhythms to which she sways and dances, falling into reveries of song that cause her to forget what she's doing and damage expensive, dangerous machines, although she does, miraculously, manage to hang onto all her limbs. She has her share of protectors: Jeff (Peter Stormare), an adoring but "slow" suitor; her factory friend Kathy (the astoundingly out-of-place Catherine Deneuve, whose Teflon grace is one of the few things here that von Trier is incapable of wrecking); and the landlords from whom she rents her pathetic (natch) little trailer, local cop Bill (David Morse) and his wife, Jean (Cara Seymour). In addition to her factory job, Selma takes little side jobs, like sliding rows of bobby pins onto cardboard cards; she amasses a wad of money that she keeps hidden in a little tin box. But one day something goes horribly wrong, and Bill accuses Selma of having stolen that money from him. From there, some really bad things happen. And then some really bad things. And so on. Von Trier has begged critics and viewers not to reveal the ending once they've seen the movie, and I have no intention of doing so. Believe me, the last thing I'd want to do to any poor soul patient enough to suffer through this monstrosity is spoil the "surprise" at the end.