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DANCER IN THE DARK Send This Review to a Friend
Daring and creative and haunting in its risky use of the musical form along with its tale of grisly capital punishment, "Dancer in the Dark" is a challenging film of the sort that inevitably divides audiences. It is a film not to be missed, no matter how one winds up feeling about it. Despite qualms about plot contrivances, I find it mesmerizing and fascinating, both conceptually and because of the extraordinary performance by the Icelandic singer Bjork. The New York Film Festival, which opened with this new work by Lars von Trier that won the top award at Cannes, is to be commended for the boldness of its choice.
Von Trier ("Breaking the Waves"), who wrote and directed, spins the story of Selma (Bjork), a Czechoslovakian immigrant working in a tool factory in the state of Washington in the mid-1960s. She is losing her eyesight from a hereditary illness, and she is desperately saving money for an operation that will save the doomed eyesight of her 10-year-old son. Selma is given to flights of fancy triggered by her love of Hollywood musicals that she saw as a girl, and at key moments in the film her imagination evolves into elaborate passages of song and dance. Bjork has composed the music, given lyrics by Von Trier and Sjon Sigurdsson, and she sings her heart out with a style and voice that gets under the skin.
Selma is naive almost to the point of being dim, but she is decent and caring, which sets her up for trouble from the married policeman who, with his wife, rents Selma a trailer. Bill, the cop, (David Morse), has eyes on Selma's savings to get him out of debt, and it is a cinch that the situation will erupt with tragic consequences. Selma's closest friend is Kathy, a co-worker played with effective intensity by Catherine Deneuve, and Peter Stormare is Jeff, who is sweet on Selma and ever-loyal to her. Joel Grey turns up as Oldrich Novy, who starred in Czech films and whose name Selma has groundlessly evoked. Grey makes the most of a charming dance sequence that bursts onto the screen in the midst of a dramatic courtroom scene.
I won't detail here key plot contrivances that make certain situations hard to believe. You'll spot them yourself. But the film, shot digitally and often with Von Trier's penchant for jerky camera realism, has a kinship with opera, and one can still be swept up by the musical interludes, which are imaginative, not in any typical Hollywood way, but are in the social comment tradition, for example, of Rene Clair's light-hearted take on capitalism in "A Nous La Liberte" (1931), or Herb Ross's more recent depression musical "Pennies From Heaven" (1981). The final portion of the film is emotionally devastating in its mix of musical fantasy and the grim climax. And yet if one isn't caught up in the method of the film, one might feel that there is also something silly about the combination. The use in the film of songs from "The Sound Of Music" borders on camp.
Such danger points aside, "Dancer in the Dark" soars as a risky gambit that often strikes home, and in addition presents a powerful showcase for Bjork, whose performance deserves to be among the year's most talked about acting achievements. A Fine Line Features release.
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