Dancer in the Dark

viewed September 23, 2000 at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas  Full Details

It can be asserted with no lack of certainty that Lars von Trier creates some of the most annoying films out there today. They are films that wallow in the depths of melodramatic pity, exploiting sympathies for weak-minded women with strong wills and odds stacked immeasurably against them. They also take dead aim at established institutions (government, church, male authority in general) and render them into caricatures of insurmountable cruelty. And most infamously, they utilize hand-held digital video cameras with freewheeling abandon, so that the dizzying movements can send an audience to nausea. The combined effect is of exploitation, manipulation and catharsis, something like a transcendent nightmare.

I had mixed feelings about Breaking the Waves, on Trier's most highly regarded film, when I first saw it, but since then it has become one of my favorite films of the past decade. That film boasted a fascinating female lead with a vision of God that was both extraordiary and ridiculous, setting up a morality play that challenged audiences on all levels: visual, emotional, and theoretical. Dancer in the Dark also features a female lead prone to visions, though ironically she can hardly see. Played by Bjork, Selma is a poor factory worker scrimping up money to pay for her son's eye operation. She gets through a gauntlet of trials and tribulations by daydreaming musical sequences incorporating all that she sees around her. Oddly enough, her musical visions do not so much resemble the Hollywood musicals she professes to love, but the proletarian work operas of the Communist Bloc.

I doubt there is much coincidence in this aesthetic resemblance, since von Trier makes an effort to attack his own symbols of latent capitalism, mostly embodied by corrupt authoritarian males: a crooked cop, a ruthless prosecuting attorney. He makes thinly veiled jabs at the failings of capitalism (the cop driven to crime in trying to maintain his wife's consumer lifestyle; a legal system that can only provide fair defense to those who can afford it). Considering as well that Selma is a Czech immigrant, it can be construed that her musical visions are visions of communism. With this much subtext figured out, speculation must now be made on what it means to say that the musical sequences are, decidely, poor.

Although in interviews von Trier claims to have a love for musicals, I would feel that it is a token love at best. He resists buying into the musical conceit, relying on Selma's tendency to enter musical daydreams derived from the ambient sounds surrounding her (machinery, trains) as the mechanism for entering musical mode. And when he is not ambivalent towards the genre and the film finally enters musical mode, he doesn't demonstrate much deftness with the song-and-dance numbers. The results range from obvious (a Stomp-like number set to factory machinery) to inspired (the sound of a choir echoing through a ventilation shaft; Selma's eerie step-dance towards the gallows). The much-lauded train sequence that utilized 100 digital camcorders is far less than what I expected -- he just strategically placed several dozen cheap camcorders to substitute for his lack of choreographic inspiration. Though there are flases of brilliance in some of these numbers, others rival only Communist operas for banality.

And so, with the silliness of these numbers von Trier seems to both parody and critique the utopian vision laden in both Communism and musicals, as if both are to be seen as antiquated idea(l)s that mock themselves in the context of today's realty-driven capitalist society. This connection is the most interesting thing about the film, though in its cinematic execution, both visually and emotionally, it is far less enthralling than Breaking the Waves. There is a lack of the intrigue that kept Breaking the Waves so watchable in spite of its tumultuous camerawork. With a slight nod to Johnny Belinda and the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, everything about this film seems predetermined. The film starts out well, with a campy good-naturedness, as Selma rehearses for her role as Maria in The Sound of Music with Catherine Deneuve, playing a woman named Cathy, providing moral support. From that point on, the fun and games are over, and the story descends nto a sadistically deliberate melodramatic plot. Her money is stolen by a corrupt cop who discovers the location of Selma's savings. Why she never put the money in a bank account I'll never know. But then, we wouldn't be treated to the melodramatic image of her taking out an enormous wad of grubby bills out of her pretty tin box.

You wonder who is more cruel: the corrupt cop in the film who exploits Selma's disability, or von Trier for essentially doing the same as director. The last act of the film is von Trier's homage to Passion of Joan of Arc, and by the end of the film I questioned not only von Trier's but his mentor Carl Dreyer's intent on inflicting so much suffering on their female leads. I wondered whether or not holding up the martyr as a symbol of female strength was dubious praise. Both their worlds seem custom made to collapse upon their women, if only because the women can take it.

Dancer in the Dark is a significant step forward in the use of digital video for film, but it is not the astral leap that prerelase buzz has praised it to be. It is disappointing that a film with tremendous visionary potential in its premise never has a singular image that completely overwhelms. Images are not von Trier's fortee; manipulating emotions through the abuse of helpless women is. Who knows how long he can keep that up.

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