DANCER IN THE DARK
BY SHARI L. ROSENBLUM

Critics and audiences take Lars von Trier too seriously. For all his aesthetic deliberateness and political pontificating, the man has a wicked sense of humor. Wicked and black. It's all there in the title of his latest offering: DANCER IN THE DARK, which, by varying and progressively bleaker degrees, describes the descending stages of the film's heroine, Selma, a Czech emigre (Bjork) from the beginning, where we snicker as she dances to The Sound of Music, the darkness her sort of beyond-naivete delusion that she can escape into her fantasies; to the end, where we gasp and fate snickers, the darkness becoming literal from within and without, overtaking all means to escape, and a different sort of dance stuns with its hopelessness.

Von Trier's humor comes out even more pronouncedly in his casting -- Bjork, of course, with a voice and style not immediately adaptive to the average audience, and Catherine Deneuve's diminutived de-glamourized Kathy, David Morse's predictably typecast Bill, and even the brief appearance of a certain television prosecutor as prosecutor in the film's one court case. One can sense a smirk and a sneer as he attempts to engage the musical in parody (Deneuve's mere presence evokes a subtextual commentary on the uber lightness of such fare as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and certain show-stopper scenes tweak at Fred Astaire-type choreographic incorporation of the pseudo-real), in attack (a chorus-like repetition of "My Favorite Things" increasingly highlights the song's failure to provide promised escape), and in revision (Bjork's appearance and musicality both at odds with show tune expectations). Pretend to disagreeable disconnection though he does, Von Trier pokes at the genre from an insider's perch, and stings with the wit of a connoisseur.

All the same, if Dancer in the Dark is an interesting showcase for the other side of humor, it is still not the sort of film one recommends indiscriminately. It is excruciatingly dull in parts, silly in ways only aficionados of a certain experimental streak can tolerate, and profoundly painful with an anti-cathartically insistent thud.

Filmed as stark and realistic, but for its punctuation by elaborately unrealistic musical numbers, the set-up is in ways quite jarringly false: a 1960s non-America anti-America mythic underbelly (with a more or less avowed Soviet cold war spin) in a flipside portrait of idealized America in the traditional Hollywood-in-concept musical. The main players are as foreign in their essence as the traditional musical's all-Americans are American. The metaphors are blunt and obvious, all about seeing, dancing, parentage, and early exits. And the plot, in itself, reads like a list of ideas thrown out of a soap opera festival: trauma upon tragedy, pathos piled high.

Dancer in the Dark, in fact, requires an incalculable amount of forgiveness, but it inspires, beyond that (if you can get beyond that), a great sense of awe. To the extent von Trier succeeds, the effect is brilliant. The acting is perfectly attuned to the mood -- so natural in places that it feels improvised. Tthe characters have enough awkwardness to make the film's awkwardness seem right.

And then - by the time it happens the audience may no longer be expecting it - Dancer in the Dark turns out to be an astoundingly moving film, with profound, genuine moments that reach through its calculatedly disingenuous melodrama and take hold of your gut. Even the bizarre musical interludes that seemed strained at first resound with unaffected poignancy. Then we are left with a surprisingly powerful parting perspective that doesn't let go for weeks, months, afterwards.

It is an achievement.

 

CineScene, 2000