DARK & DARKER : 'Dancer in the Dark' & 'Get Carter'. - Review - movie review

Commonweal, Nov 3, 2000 by Rand Richards Cooper

Few directors of late have sparked such vehement opinion as Lars von Trier, whose new film, Dancer in the Dark, won both cheers and jeers this year at Cannes. Von Trier's oeuvre includes The Kingdom, a creepy, Stephen King-like series for Danish television about a haunted hospital; Zentropa, a hypnotic and surreal trip into postwar Germany; and Breaking the Waves, with Emily Watson as a passionate naif who immolates herself on her husband's sadistic will. Von Trier is a director born for auteur theory. His films bear a signature stamp of harshness and lyricism, and are curiously assaultive of their audience, inducing powerful dream-like states of joy and then violently undercutting them.

Dancer in the Dark follows a Czech immigrant named Selma (played by the Icelandic pop singer, Bjork), who's stuck in a life of misery in Washington State in LBJ-era America. A single mother suffering a degenerative eye disease, she's going blind, and working double shifts in a steel-pressing plant to save for an eye operation for her similarly afflicted son. The film was actually shot in Sweden (von Trier doesn't fly), and makes only the most perfunctory stab at hiding its non-American settings and accents. But no matter, because von Trier soon makes clear that realism isn't exactly the program. Selma loves Broadway musicals, and escapes the backbreaking drudgery of her life through daydreams that transform the world around her into music and dance. "I've got little games I play when it's hard," she says to her would-be suitor, Jeff (Peter Stomare). "In the factory, the machines, they've got rhythms." In her imagination she starts to sing, and when others join in, Dancer in the Dark turns, against all odds, into a musical.

Von Trier is a leading member of the Dogma 95 movement, a group of Danish filmmakers who pledged themselves to ten cinematic "vows of chastity"--handheld cameras, natural sound and lighting, no extravagant props or costumes, and so on. Dogma 95 productions include Soren Kragh-Jacobsen's Mifune and Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration, but its influence extends all the way to such homegrown films as The Blair Witch Project. Applying its rather severe principles to von Trier's own lavishly fantastic sensibility makes for a weird blend of aestheticism and asceticism. Dancer begins with a gorgeous abstract color show--shifting shapes of color set to swelling orchestral music--then abruptly dumps us into Dogma 95 reality mode. The camera wanders from face to face, like a home movie, and the film has a grainy, pale look, as if shot at precisely that point of dimming light where objects begin to lose their color: the look of incipient blindness, in other words.

Except during the musical numbers. Each time von Trier segues into one of Selma's musical dream sequences, Dancer in the Dark makes a Wizard of Oz-like shift into brilliant color. Selma sings and dances, performing pop arias (written by Bjork and von Trier ) of sorrow and hope--sparkly wish fulfillments in which a dead man rises and walks again, Selma's tormentors turn into comforters, and "there's always someone to catch me." Those who have wronged her and those she has wronged join together in literal choruses of forgiveness.

It's outrageous and incredibly campy, all these machine operators suddenly turned into whirling dancers--and it would be funny, if von Trier let it. But he doesn't; the splashes of color and soaring lyrics never entirely distract us from the underlying beat of doom. Dancer in the Dark has an absurdly melodramatic plot, involving a killing and subsequent trial, that's as trumped-up as any musical, but morbid in the extreme; it makes Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd seem like a walk in the park, with Selma croaking "My Favorite Things" in a death-row cellblock. I won't reveal more of the ending except that it gives the most macabre twist to "Listen to your heart" in the annals of film. Von Trier takes grotesque ironies and puns, and plays them straight, manipulating events toward gallows humor--literally--and then refusing to let you laugh.

Like Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves, Bjork as Selma projects a childlike, oblivious joy. There's a poignant sweetness to her--she thanks the boss who fires her--and she's incapable of anger, even when betrayed (though she reacts with sudden animal violence when backed into a corner.) Such vulnerability is hard to watch, and--again as in Breaking the Waves--von Trier pushes his heroine along a curve of events so inexorable that a fatalistic mood seeps in from the start. All his movies feature a central death, and are suffused by a harsh, glowing religiosity less Christian than pagan; they have the feel of a sacrifice, a public spectacle with all the attendant energies of ecstasy, bloodlust, and dread.

Dancer in the Dark is an outlandish movie, turning camp into catharsis and fashioning a bizarre testament to the power of imagination in the face of suffering. People speak of von Trier as a love-him-or-hate-him director, but to me it's love him and hate him. He's maddening but fascinating, not in the least because he's so willfully contradictory--placing himself in the aesthetic handcuffs of an austere dogma and then somehow wriggling his way out, Houdini style, into this film. As with any escape artist, the illusion will work to his advantage, as long as we're asking, "How did he do that?" and not "Why?"