Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
Dancer in the Dark is one of those films laden with controversy. Critics seem to either love it or hate it. For me personally, it was the worst film that I’ve seen in many a moon. I acknowledge, however, that many viewers find it interesting, satisfying, and emotionally draining. I found it annoyingly flawed, technically, thematically, and narratively.
Historical Background: Lars Von Trier made his first feature film, The Element of Crime, in 1984. He followed that with Epidemic (1987) and Medea (1988). His first film to gain significant international acclaim was Zentropa (1991), which earned both the Prix du Technique (Technical Prize) and the Jury Price (Director’s Award) at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. Von Trier was so angry, however, that the film did not also win the Palme d’Or that he gave the jury the finger and stalked off. His next film, The Kingdom (1994), was conceived as the first part of a trilogy. The Kingdom II was made in 1997 but it remains to be seen if part III will ever be made, considering that the two lead performers passed away after the completion of part II. Von Trier had his second “run-in” with the Cannes Festival juries in 1996, when his entry, Breaking the Waves, also failed to win the Palme d’Or. The Idiots (1998) was made in adherence to the Dogme 95 “vow of cinematic chastity”, the precepts of which include filming exclusively with hand-held cameras, filming on location, radical realism, and the director remaining anonymous. Dancer in the Dark (2000) is certainly Dogme-esque, but failed to qualify for the official Dogme seal of approval because the musical numbers were enhanced post-shooting and because Von Trier’s name appears in the credits. It did, however, win for Von Trier the Palme d’Or from Cannes that he had so avidly coveted. The selection was widely booed, however, by many in the Cannes audience. The film also earned the Cannes award for Best Actress for its waif-like Icelandic rock singer and star, Björk. Since Dancer in the Dark, Von Trier has made such films as Dogville (2002), and Mandalay (2003). Von Trier’s body of work is striking for its innovativeness and technical mastery, but less so for narrative excellence or thematic content.
The Story: In brief, Selma (Björk) is a diminutive, sweet-smiling, Czech immigrant living in Washington State in America in 1964. She works in a factory but is rapidly going blind. Her problem is an unspecified genetic disorder that has been passed on as well to her beloved son, Gene (Vladica Kostic). Selma and Gene live in a trailer park owned and operated by a couple named the Houstons, Bill (David Morse) and Linda (Cara Seymour). They are friendly to her and sometimes watch her son when he comes home from school. Selma’s best friend is Kathy (Catherine Deneuve), a co-worker and protector. She helps Selma out when her blindness causes her to make mistakes while operating the machinery of the factory. Selma’s only joys in life are an occasional movie with Kathy and performing in musicals, such as The Sound of Music. Selma also has a suitor, of sorts, a somewhat dim-witted but devoted man named Jeff (Peter Stormare), who shows up at the factory at quitting time each day to offer Selma a ride home. Selma, however, has no time for romance because her single-minded purpose in life is to save up enough money to enable her son to get an operation that will save his vision. It’s already too late to save her own. Selma works extra shifts and attaches bobby-pins to cards for sale in stores to earn extra income.
Bill, who works as a policeman, also has financial problems. His wife, Linda, thinks that he has inherited money but he is, in fact, quite broke. She spends more than they can afford and the bank is threatening to repossess their home. Bill is afraid that his wife will leave him if she discovers that he has no money. Bill steals the nest-egg that Selma has been squirreling away for Gene’s operation. He admits it but refuses to return the money, caring more about his own problem than Selma’s. They fight over the money, Bill draws his gun, and, in the ensuing struggle, Bill is shot. He begs Selma to finish him off and refuses to let go of the money. Unable to pull the money from his grasp, Selma finally acts on his request and finishes him off, first, by emptying the gun into him and, second, by whacking him over the head multiple times with his money drawer. Selma is duly arrested and tried in a grossly lop-sided process featuring a vicious prosecutor but no defense attorney anywhere in sight. She is sentenced to death. Von Trier has expressly requested that the ending of his film not be given away, as Chabrol sometimes did, and I’ll honor his request, though it implies more surprise and profoundness than the ending actually warrants.
Production Values: Very few films elicit as extreme a range of responses as Dancer in the Dark. Many viewers and critics praise it as a masterpiece while many others loathe the film. I find much to respect about the film but very little to like. On the positive side, there’s no denying Von Trier’s willingness to take chances. He routinely defies cinematic conventions. It is daring, for example, to intermix musical numbers with a film that is mainly a tragedy. It’s daring as well for a Dane to make a film in English, set in America but filmed in Sweden, featuring an international cast of performers from Iceland, Germany, England, Sweden, France, and Canada. It’s even daring to feature a patently anti-American theme in a film intended for marketing in America. There were also supposed technical innovations such as the simultaneous use of one-hundred cameras for some or all of the scenes.
The insertion of musical numbers amidst the narrative reminds me a bit of the film style of the Bombay film industry – so-called Bollywood – as in, for example, Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India. As I said in reviewing that film, I like to concede a film its essential conventions and accept such peculiarities, basically, as the film’s context. I had no difficulty adjusting to the halting of the forward progress of the story, every now and then, for one of Selma’s surreal fantasy excursions in song and dance. It’s not different in principal from the surreal dream elements that I’ve admired in many other films. I found Björk’s vocal qualities generally pleasing as well. I also accept Von Trier’s convention of filming the musical scenes in rich, vivid color but the rest of the film in a kind of color-drained palette that reinforces the story’s somber and bleak quality.
Nevertheless, there were a myriad of narrative, thematic, and technical weaknesses for this film that left me feeling far more annoyed than entertained or impressed. In the technical domain, I might mention first the nauseatingly unstable hand-held cameras. I’ve tolerated swaying hand-held cameras in some other films for the positive contribution made to the story’s presentation, such as in Rosetta. The argument for filming in this manner is based on the idea that it creates a strong sense of realism and immediacy. One example of a scene in Dancer in the Dark in which this technique is utilized in the scene in which Selma and Bill exchange “secrets” during a conversation in her trailer. The camera pans back and forth between the two as they converse, as if we, the viewers, were onlookers standing nearby. There are a couple of problems, however. Since the conversation consisted of a dialog composed of short comments, the camera often didn’t get to the speaker until they were halfway through their comment. Then, the camera would sway back while the other speaker was already into his or her piece of the dialog. Now, you might argue that this technique mimics an eavesdropper turning his head back and forth to catch a conversation, but the fact is that it doesn’t because we typically observe such a conversation mainly by rotating our eyes, with just enough head movement to make up any additional displacement that the eyes alone can’t accommodate. The transfer of gaze from one speaker to the other is very much faster than what the camera was able to accomplish. In fact, that is precisely why these scenes are nauseating to watch as filmed by Von Trier while we do not become nauseated observing two people in conversation. In the end, this filming tactic which is supposed to generate realism doesn’t do so. Instead, it creates a self-conscious kind of filmmaking where we are made aware of the fact that we are watching a film rather than reality. The technique fails to accomplish what it purports to accomplish.
The concept of the song-and-dance numbers is fine for me but the execution of them was exceedingly poor. Musically, the songs are uninteresting and unmemorable, even though the quality of Björk’s renditions are fine. The songs were all composed by Björk to words written by Von Trier. She’s a far better vocalist than composer. Then, the choreography of the dance elements is painfully weak. Contrast the dance routines in this film, for example, with those in Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India. There’s just no comparison. Stylistically, the musical numbers in Dancer in the Dark are more like music videos than old fashioned musicals or operettas, but not up to the quality of better music videos.
This film was photographed digitally, creating a course gritty appearance in much of the film. Gritty texture had historically been employed to good effect in many of the films shot in the late 1940’s and 1950’s during the neorealism movement in Italy, but most of those films were in black-and-white. The gritty texture of Dancer in the Dark adds nothing to its sense of realism and, in fact, has quite the opposite effect. Like the swaying camera, it serves to remind us that we’re watching a rather poorly shot film.
Viewers of this film will notice immediately that the delivery of the dialog is not much like that of any other film that you’ve seen lately. It’s reminiscent, in fact, of so-called reality television, but mostly the staged kind of “reality” situations. The characters in this film don’t talk naturally – at least not in any way similar to any people I’ve ever known. They sound like actors trying to deliver lines “as if” they were being delivered in real conversation. The dialog in this film was just about the least credible I can recall listening to in a film. The pacing of the film is very poor, periodically shifting into a painfully slow gear. The editing is erratic as well.
There are reasons why film “conventions” exist. They consist of techniques that have proven effective in making high quality films. There is nothing wrong with a director violating one or more film convention if that deviation from the norm has some enriching effect on the film’s artistry. One gets the feeling that Von Trier is more interested in adopting unusual and sometimes admittedly innovative techniques for the wrong reasons, such as adhering to an arbitrary dogma (the Dogme 95 precepts) or inciting controversy. Von Trier is too much a sensationalist and too little a true artist. Dogme 95 claims contempt for cinematic “tricks” but its obsessive search for purity and realism becomes its own kind of trick.
All of these technical shortcomings pale, however, in comparison to the inanity of the script. The story in this film is ridden with cliché after cliché, all designed to milk sentiment to an absurd extent. It’s not enough, for example, that Selma is going blind, that her son has inherited the same disorder, that she is working herself to death and to blindness to save money so he can get the vision-saving operation, but Von Trier then feels compelled to throw in such maudlin lines as Selma explaining to Kathy why Gene must not know about her impending death by capital punishment, “His eyes might get worse and worse from worrying and then the operation won’t work.” Oh, really! A psychosomatic, hereditary eye problem! Give me a break! It’s not enough to put the martyr to death in the electric chair or by injection. Von Trier has to send her to the gallows and insert a convenient but pathetic delay to heighten dramatic tension. What I gather most from this film’s plot is that Von Trier is one rather sick cookie. In this film as well as its spiritual kin, Breaking the Waves, Von Trier seems to be fixated on entertaining his audience by depicting obsessive, self-sacrificing, waif-like females being very nearly systematically and sadistically tortured. Von Trier himself stated that he is deeply opposed to the death penalty but allowed that “execution scenes are God’s gift to directors. They’re very efficient. If you’re going to be a martyr you have to die.” Björk, who had such a difficult relationship with Von Trier that she actually quit the filming project for several days, stated that she initially believed that Von Trier’s sympathies in the film Breaking the Waves lay with the victimized heroine, but later concluded that he actually identified with the sadistic husband.
Then, there are also grave weaknesses with the main theme of the film, which is a deconstruction of the so-called “American Dream.” Now, let me say that I’m a political leftist myself and am about as critical of certain aspects of life in America as a person can be. I recently read a very interesting article contrasting the American Dream with the European Dream, which argued that the European Dream centers on inclusiveness while the American Dream is based on separating yourself and distinguishing yourself from your fellow citizens: more money, more financial security, a better job, more expensive vacation trips, and so forth. In America, we care less about our neighbors than do Europeans. Europeans provide socialized medicine, for example, while we in America have a much wider range in what’s provided for the “haves” vs. the “have-nots.” Every indication is that the disparity between the American Dream and that of Europe is widening, not narrowing, as America appears to be turning more toward the Republican “every man for himself” philosophy and away from the safety net theory of the Democrats. Dancer in the Dark is an unveiled attack on the American Dream in ways that I fundamentally agree with, but the attack is so over-the-top that it loses all credibility. Von Trier is attacking, for example, capital punishment (not practiced in most European countries), lack of availability of needed medical care for those in poverty, police corruption, bias in the justice system, and rampant anti-Communism. Yet, he presents these supposed problems in such great excess than the entire point of the film becomes laughable. When, for example, have you ever seen a trial in which only the prosecutor is shown and no defense attorney. Von Trier’s film defeats itself in other ways as well. Why, for example, did Selma, born in Czechoslovakia, come to America? So she could earn enough money for her son’s operation. Apparently economic opportunity was better in America than in Czechoslovakia. Or perhaps it was a kind of operation that could be performed only in America – because socialized medicine in such places as Canada and Europe is less able to compete in development of state-of-the-art medical techniques. Von Trier has his heroine coming to America to seek what is unavailable in Europe but then expects his film to come across as a condemnation of America.
To end on a positive note, let’s turn to the performances. I thought Björk’s performance superb within the limitations of the script, which forced too much cloying emotionality onto her part. She fully deserved, in my opinion, the Cannes award for Best Actress even if the film in no way merited the Palme d’Or. Catherine Deneuve did her usual marvelous and professional job with her part, especially considering that she was terribly underutilized in the part as well as miscast. Next to Björk, I thought Peter Stormare the most effective in his role as Jeff. I could barely stand David Morse as Bill Houston, though it’s impossible for me to separate, in this case, his performance from the script problems for his character.
Bottom-Line: I’m not going to advise you to either see or not see this film. It is clear from the range of reviews here at Epinions and elsewhere that many viewers cherish this film while many others loath it. Your best bet is to read a few reviews on each side of the issue in order to gauge whether your personal inclinations are more likely to match those of the fans or the boo-birds for this movie. I found Dancer in the Dark woefully inadequate in multiple respects and cannot imagine ever wanting to watch it again. You might be thrilled by it instead. Dancer in the Dark is in English and also offers optional English subtitles for the hearing impaired or those having trouble with one or another of the heavily accented voices. The running time is 141 minutes.
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