Deservedly winning the Palme D'Or for its canny blend of showstopping tunes and brutal naturalism, Dancer in the Dark is an emotionally exhausting swipe at American in-justice. At the heart of Trier's film Bjork delivers one of the most heartrending performances on screen since Falconetti as Joan of Arc.
The cruel machinery of Capital and Macarthyism savages Selma, handicapped single mother and refugee from Com... more >
There's nothing like tragedy for sobering you up.
The cruel machinery of Capital and Macarthyism savages Selma, handicapped single mother and refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia, until her naive American dream is cruelly and comprehensively destroyed. Yet, out of the total ruin of her impossibly romantic vision there arises - through the miracle of her (literally) blind faith in her dream - the hope of a new generation, when she succeeds in bequeathing to her son a Promised Land that must forever be hidden from her own darkening prospect.
The hyper-reality of the musical escapes, which Selma's mind is forced through the harshness and disappointment of her impoverished life in America to indulge, deploy an impressive range of cinematic tricks. Von Trier is thoughtfully demonstrating the unhealthy nature of the culture that Hollywood services. This is a machine-culture, just as the Soviet model which Selma sought to escape is a Robot culture, and her tragic fantasies of transforming such crude machinery into the stuff of dreams - a la the American musical - are no better than escapist delusion. There comes to mind the famous reflection of Marx, regretting another cultural 'opium', that was such a need of the People in a hostile capitalist culture.
Ultimately, the film deliberately follows Selma's saving intuition that fantasy-closure is a false closure: Both the character Selma and the director insist that the 'last' musical escape from unbearable reality is nothing of the kind. Just as, in childhood, Selma loved to leave the cinema before the last number, so as to allow the film to play on into her everyday experience, so von Trier refuses the musical's traditionally crafted formulae of neat closure. As in the theatre of Euripides, we are given only the appearance of intervention by some reliable mechanical agency external to the ineluctable logic of the action, and are left with a chilly realisation of the irrelevance of all human artifice and contrivance.
It is with this understanding that it is only the striving for absolute integrity that can hope to redeem humanity that von Trier vindicates his own oft-quoted Dogme manifesto with a moral dimension. In that much misunderstood document, a responsible film-maker just seeks to remind himself and anyone who cares to listen that creative falsity should be avoided: He declares himself to be an enemy of the facile and the formulaic, which are the stock-in-trade of the industrial manufacturers of mere entertainment.
Thus, the musical 'escapes' are the cruellest parts of the film, and the audience's manufactured pleasures are predicated on Selma's pain. It is deliberately contrived that the execution suite reminds us of the tiny amateur rehearsal stage for Selma's beloved 'Sound of Music': The ultimate escape, for us as for Selma, is from man's vicious contrivances. The spectacle of dancing in the dark finally seems like an access of shame and guiltiness on the director's part for his complicity in this relentless tragedy of a blameless, if perhaps mistaken, life: A complete aversion of the agent of sight, in a kind of upward-rolling cinematic faint, obliterates the uniquely visual nature of the medium. No shallow theme-park shudder can shake off this existential horror. And yet ... this juddering fearful monster is the breathing human heart: Terrible, but irreduceably it is Life, it is what makes us human.
It strikes one that there are themes here that could be pursued also, with some benefit, in a study of Kubrick's 'Clockwork Orange', recently re-released. From a Dogme point of view, it has recently struck me that Kubrick sees his own film as just another clockwork orange - just another disappointing toy, drained of all substance. Where Kubrick employed an increasingly abused Beethoven (and his misguided 'disciple' Alex) as an epic measure of modernity's meaninglessness, so von Trier gives us Bjork's child-like musical grace as a comparable measure of the terrible Fall of Man. It is neither the abominably misguided Alex, nor the naively confused Selma ('Silly Selma' as she calls herself) who are to blame for the state of this world. Of course, they are its necessary victims. They are both subject to cultural formulae of near-diabolical power, that influence them in ways they do not understand. The crude commercial materialism of Kubrick's Dystopia is as much the villain of his piece as is the 'happy-ever-after' Panglossianism that has so nearly seduced Selma, in von Trier's.
In both films, we are appalled by the reductive effect which modern culture, and even the very medium of communication, has upon the individual. This is the surest demonstration of the necessity of such unblinking creative honesty. Such individuals purify human experience, by their lonely willingness to confront the dark places of human experience. We are not far from the Aristotelian notion of 'catharsis', or purgation, in thinking so. Ours is a society sickened by a surfeit of addictive trash. Well, there's nothing like tragedy for sobering you up. It is a paradox often observed since the days of the earliest Greek dramas, that the spectacle of horror - conveyed not crudely, but with humane empathy, be it understood - is morally purifying. In this context, it is the censors who are the immoralists. Kubrick, of course, spared his film from the fate of being regarded as smut only fit for suppression, by withdrawing it himself. It had become a clockwork orange in the hands of the cultural arbiters. And its disappearance was another act in the tragedy of Alex - as the refusal by von Trier to conform to the commercial demands of the entertainment industry finds its dramatic counterpart in the musical delusions of Selma.
The Danish director Lars Von Trier is one of the world's most famous independent filmmakers. His films are largely made using hand-held, home-video camcorders with ama... more >
The Danish director Lars Von Trier is one of the world's most famous independent filmmakers. His films are largely made using hand-held, home-video camcorders with amazing results. Dancer In The Dark is his latest film, starring Björk and Catherine Deneuve. Björk plays Selma, a Czech immigrant and a single mother working in a factory in rural America. She escapes from the hardships of her work in evening drama classes and Hollywood musicals from days gone by. But Selma harbours a secret: she is losing her eyesight and unless she can save enough money to pay for an operation for her 10-year-old son, he will inherit her blindness. When a desperate neighbour falsely accuses Selma of stealing, her life begins to slip away towards a tragic and devastating end. Dancer In The Dark is utterly heartbreaking and has a truly amazing performance from Björk, who also composed the music for this film. Not for a long time has there been such a display of power on the screen.
