Whiny Dancer

Björk lights up Lars von Trier's Dark

by Peter Keough

DANCER IN THE DARK. Written and directed by Lars von Trier. With Björk, Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, Peter Stormare, Joel Grey, Vincent Patterson, Cara Seymour, Jean-Marc Barr, Vladica Kostic, Siobhan Fallon, Stellan Skarsgård, and Udo Kier. A Fine Line Films release. At the Avon.

There are the movies that people either hate or love, and there are the movies that people hate and love. Dancer in the Dark is both. Why so divisive? The director, for one -- Lars von Trier is a director with a flair for the sublime and the ridiculous, for Breaking the Waves and The Idiots. The genre, too -- Dancer is a musical (though a much darker one than those in love with Astaire and Rogers might allow for), and it brings the conflicts between artifice and reality center stage, tapping into the deepest preconceptions about what movies, and art in general, are supposed to do. Are they reflections of life? Efforts to transcend it? A way of passing the time until the final fade-out? Whatever your take on these questions, Trier's Palme d'Or winner at Cannes will find a way to be annoying, and admirable.

Maybe it just comes down to one's taste for Björk, Dancer's feral, elfin star and composer of the soundtrack and its six production numbers. As Selma, the benighted Czech immigrant in a factory town in 1964 Washington state (the setting is established in an opening title but largely forgotten for the rest of the movie), the former Sugarcube embodies the obsessive Trier type set by Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves: a simple and single-minded cabbage-patch doll groomed for martyrdom.

Introduced in one of the film's most charming scenes, a Guffman-like rehearsal of an amateur staging of The Sound of Music, Selma turns out to be a bit of a pill, hard on begoggled son Gene (Vladica Kostic), unappreciative of her long-suffering friend and fellow immigrant worker Kathy (Catherine Deneuve, her Cinderella beauty and French accent shining through), and dismissive of the lovelorn Jeff (Peter Stormare), a local yokel who seems a cross between endearing idiot savant and pathetic stalker. The only people she's civil to are her landlords, Bill (David Morse), the dour local sheriff with an inherited fortune, and his wife, Linda (Cara Seymour), a bubbly spendthrift.

Trier, meanwhile, is equally hard on his audience, shooting with handheld digital cameras in a washed-out parody of Dogma 95 purity, an in-your-face assault of wobbly close-ups invoking more vertigo than verisimilitude. The reality he records, however, owes more to the corniest conventions of Hollywood tearjerkers than to any slice of life. Selma and Gene, it turns out, are going blind, from the same congenital disorder. She's working against time to save up enough to pay for the boy's operation, which must take place, for some fairy-tale or melodramatic reason (puberty? there's definitely an Oedipal castration thing going on), when he turns 13. All goes awry, though, when Bill, who's less well off than he seems and a lot more despicable, "borrows" Selma's savings; this leads to a fatal confrontation and, ultimately, death row.

This is the gritty real world from which the musical imagination of Selma creates solipsistic song-and-dance numbers. And indeed, when the first tune, "Cvalda," emerges 40 minutes into the movie from the rhythmic racket of the sheet-metal factory, magic occurs. A fairy coloring tints the monochrome and the single mobile camera shatters into a hundred stationary lenses as the desperate, exultant dancing and incantatory song briefly transform the banality. The ecstasy lasts long enough for Selma to destroy a machine and lose her job. With each downward step in her decline, another uncanny number emerges, turning her oppressive surroundings into liberating music.

Drawing the everyday into the music has been a convention of the genre from the beginning -- check out the opening of Rouben Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight (1931) for a more tuneful example of what Trier is doing. Neither is the notion of musical tragedy new -- the "Forgotten Man" number of Golddiggers of 1933 is a precursor to Dancer's "I've Seen It All," perhaps the film's most moving moment. Here the stakes are higher, as the adversary of the imagination proves to be not just the inanimate world but death itself.

In that regard, it's simple-minded Jeff who asks the most intelligent questions. Bewildered by Selma's love of Hollywood musicals, he wonders why the characters suddenly break into song and dance. Later, when the situation has turned darker, he asks a related question: why did Selma have a child when she knew he would suffer her disease? He's referring to her defective vision, but he could as well mean the universal disease of mortality. Why sing or dance or bring others into the show if it means nothing and ends in nothing? Although you may long for Selma's death before the film is over, Dancer does illuminate her halting steps in the darkness with glints of genius and joy.