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 Harvard Square and the Coolidge Corner and in the suburbs.

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.

Score queen It's not difficult to figure out why Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark is such a polarizing film. Much of it is shot in what could be called enhanced Dogma 95, with grainy textures and drained colors, a swerving handheld camera and seemingly random jump cuts. Now and then, as it slides into a musical number featuring lead actress Björk, the colors brighten and the shots become more traditionally composed. Detractors have a lot to harp on -- if the mise-en-scène doesn't make you physically ill, there's always the bizarre casting to scoff at and the brazenly melodramatic plot to feel superior to. You'll need an odd mix of detachment and susceptibility to appreciate the audacity of Trier's postmodern primitivism while at the same time letting the lushly sad songs pierce your hard-won veneer of sophistication. Personally, I thought it was brilliant. The new Björk EP, Selmasongs (Elektra), is the musical soundtrack from the movie, taking up 32 minutes of its 140-minute running time. The disc, like the film, begins with an instrumental overture written by Björk and orchestrated by Vincent Mendoza. In the movie it plays over a slide show of brightly colored abstractions, an apparent homage to West Side Story, but heard without the visuals it's more reminiscent of another Bernstein score, the one he did for On the Waterfront. It centers on a simple but slightly pained-sounding seven-note theme played on French horns that rises out of an ominous drone like dubious hope emerging from permanent despair (and pish-tosh to those who say there are no hummable songs here -- I haven't been able to get that theme out of my head for a week). The set-up for the musical numbers is that Björk's Selma -- who's going blind, as is her son -- is given to escapist reveries that are triggered by the natural rhythms she hears and that take the form of the type of production numbers found in the musicals she adores. That might sound cheesy, but just factor in Trier's hyper-realism (you have to see it) and Björk, of whom I've never been a big fan but whose combination of unforced naïveté and passion fits in perfectly here. The first number, "Cvalda," takes place in the pressing plant, where Selma tends to space out even on non-musical days. The monotonously repetitious stamp and wheeze of the machines become a techno-underpinning for the normally shy worker's first ecstatic fantasy outburst (the lyrics to this dense song can be accessed at www.björk.com). "I've Seen It All," which grows out of the clacking of a passing train, is a duet between Selma and her frustrated suitor, Jeff (Peter Stormare, who was Steve Buscemi's goonish sidekick in Fargo). As if it weren't strange enough to see Stormare's hulking dimwit crooning a ballad, his singing is dubbed by the eternally discontented Thom Yorke of Radiohead. The song is meant to demonstrate Selma's resignation to her encroaching blindness, but its sad grandeur (Mendoza again) and those sudden emotional leaps (a Björk specialty) give the lie to the brave-face lyrics. Björk's passion also saves "Scatterheart," a song Selma addresses to her son, from mawkishness. Actually, this number goes to the film's melodramatic heart -- which is one of its stickiest points. If Trier is the supreme ironist, then the melodrama here must be of the wink-wink variety. Yet when Björk, after singing about how her son is going to have a hard life that she can do nothing to prevent, belts out, "You are gonna have to find out for yourself," no scrim of insincerity is discernible to save us from the rawness. It just plain hurts. "In the Musicals," then, is a brief respite from all this knotty grimness, though it's also the most self-deluding number and has a truly nasty piece of foreshadowing when Selma sings of the musicals that "you were always there to catch me/When I fall . . . " The circumstances of the closer song, "New World," shouldn't be described to someone who hasn't seen the film -- suffice to say that Trier goes too far, which is one of the reasons it's so devastating. The melody here is that of the plaintive overture. The lyrics begin in a dadaist mode -- "Train whistles, a sweet clementine/Blueberries, dancers in line/Cobwebs, a bakery sign" -- but soon get to the point: "If living is seeing/I'm holding my breath/In wonder -- I wonder/What happens next?" And then . . . nothing. -- Richard C. Walls

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.