Film: Improprieties. - Review - movie review

National Review, Oct 23, 2000 by John Simon

The movie-for which Trier was writer, director, and cameraman-was filmed in Sweden but takes place in rural America, where he has never been because of his fear of flying. But the topographical and related inauthenticities are the least of his problems. There is inane pretentiousness from the very beginning, when the screen wallows in cavorting abstractions while the soundtrack offers a lengthy and grandiose "Overture" by Bjork, the Icelandic pop singer, who, besides starring, composed all the monotonously dreary music, lugubriously orchestrated and seemingly emerging from a deep (though not deep enough) cave.

The story is a blatant, tearjerking melodrama that would have made D. W. Griffith blush. Selma (Bjork), a hard-working Czech immigrant to Washington State, is going blind of some unnamed illness (beware of movies with unnamed illnesses), which also threatens her young son. Though she can no longer properly see the dangerous machinery at which she toils by day, she signs up for the night shift as well to scrounge together the money for a costly eye operation for her boy. A troubled cop steals the money, which Selma keeps in a shoebox (no banks in America?), and as she struggles to wrest it back from him, he is killed with his own gun. Despite some good friends' efforts to hire a decent defense lawyer for her, Selma refuses to spend the operation money on a lawyer, and prefers-with all kinds of vile people ganging up on her-to hang instead.

As if that weren't enough, the locals are putting on an amateur production of The Sound of Music, in which Selma's near-blindness forces her to relinquish the role of Maria. But never mind: She has numerous fantasies, right up to the gallows, to beautify her life. They consist of would-be infectious Busby Berkeleyish musical numbers, even more ineptly staged than the rest of the film. Catherine Deneuve is absurdly cast as a drab factory worker, and the lyrics to Bjork's songs, co-written by Trier, are inept. My favorite one accompanies Selma on the 107 steps from the death-row cell to the gallows. The lyrics are the numbers 1 to 107.