Denmark/France/Sweden, R, 160 m, 2000
When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Danish
filmmaker Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the
Dark was received with an equal blend of foot-stomping approval and emphatic
middle-finger salutes. (It still managed to bag the coveted Palme d’Or,
though.) If I had attended that screening, you surely would’ve caught me
standing amongst the naysayers, hurling rotten fruit at the screen. Honest to
God, I can’t recall a single frame from Dancer
in the Dark that didn’t irk me. The film’s narrative shifts back and
forth between “gritty” reality and adolescent fantasy, ironically
contrasting the desaturated colors and Godard-style jump-cuts of cinema vérité
with the blithe song and dance routines of early Hollywood musicals. An apparent
Socialist, the director pulls out all the stops in his reckless attempt to forge
a stinging indictment of our country’s judicial system and what he perceives
to be the fib bracing the American Dream. But like most on his side of the
political fence, Trier resorts to doltish overstatement or flat-out fabrication
to push forth his tired agenda. (The mismanagement of justice that the final act
hinges upon is laughably implausible.) For the torturous 160 minutes that Dancer
in the Dark plods along, Trier won’t let us forget that life in America
seldom resembles anything ever conjured up by Busby Berkeley, though unless
you’re a bigger idiot than the director is, you probably already knew that. The picture takes place in a small, dungy town in
Washington State circa 1964. Icelandic diva Bjork (!) stars as Selma Jezkova, a
Czechoslovakian immigrant and single mother who slaves away day and night at a
clattery assembly plant, only taking time out to wallow in her toe-tapping,
Technicolor fantasyland. (That she should’ve grown out of such batty daydreams
around age eight suggests that Selma may actually be insane.) Tragically, poor
Selma is going blind and her son stands to suffer the same fate as his myopic
mom if she doesn’t put away enough money to pay for his corrective surgery.
She routinely cheats on eye exams to keep working, dutifully squirreling away
every penny she earns, which is supplemented by spending evenings in her
broken-down trailer packaging hairpins into cardboard display sleeves. Selma
doesn’t put her hard-earned green into a financial institution as most (sane)
folks would, but rather in a little cookie tin that she stashes behind her
ironing board. Bill (David Morse), a self-loathing scumbag copper from next
door, has learned of Selma’s hiding place, and promptly steals the modest
cache of dough in a desperate attempt to keep up with his better-half’s
expensive tastes. But when Selma confronts him, he somehow goads her into
killing him, shoving his revolver in her hands until she relents by squeezing
the trigger—not once, not twice, but until the whole goddamned chamber is
emptied! Though it was rather silly from the get-go, this is the point where Dancer in the Dark plunges into utter stupidity. Trier is setting
the stage for the picture’s grievous denouement, but his manner in getting us
there is so inconceivable that it surely would’ve been laughed off the screen
by this film’s admirers if it was a Hollywood production. Worse, he expects us
from the first reel to perceive Selma as some sort of saint, a benevolent,
pixie-faced soul who’d do just about anything for you. (We know this by the
way Bjork’s chubby-cheeked visage keeps ingratiating itself into the
camera’s lens, and how she won’t stop flashing that icky-sweet smile.)
Indeed, Selma’s charity is so unfailing that if you ask her to kill you,
she’ll oblige, albeit with some trepidation. After all, the bespectacled imp
does weep during the cop’s execution. (This is further proof that Selma is
whacked out of her skull.) Alas, Selma is convicted of first-degree murder, and promptly sentenced to death. But be forewarned, gentle reader, it’s an agonizingly long wait before our heroine meets her grisly Waterloo at the end of a hangman’s noose. Until then, we get to spend more time with Selma as she conjures up even more musical fantasies, all of which are staged in a maddeningly sluggish, by-the-numbers fashion. Trier doesn’t know the first thing about musicals, or why people enjoy them. For him, they’re just emblematic of America’s delusional belief in a sunnier tomorrow. March 20, 2001 © Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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