Dancer in the Dark – review

The Palme D’or winner at the turn of the millennium feels all Danish mouth and no trousers, says Stephen Dallimore 

Bjork – Dancer in The Dark. No, not redoing that Springsteen song.

DANCER IN THE DARK (2000)
DIRECTOR: Lars von Trier
COUNTRY: Denmark
RUNNING TIME: 140 minutes
WATCH IF YOU LIKE: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Melancholia

DANISH director Lars von Trier has always been something of a darling of the Cannes Film Festival, so it was of little surprise when his musical tragedy Dancer in the Dark claimed the festival’s top prize, the Palme D’Or, in 2000. The award completed a hat-trick of the festival’s top awards for von Trier, having won the Jury Prize and the Grand Prix previously for Europa and Breaking the Waves respectively.

The film polarised critics, with The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw branding the film “silly, shallow and manipulative”, and Variety’s Derek Elley dismissing the film as “artistically bankrupt”. Roger Ebert, in what was otherwise a positive review, said that those who despised the film had an “excellent case” for doing so.

So who was right? Had the Cannes jury seen something the critics hadn’t in Dancer or had they allowed their collective love affair with von Trier’s work to cloud their judgment?

The film tells the story of Selma (played with no little gusto by Björk), an immigrant Czech factory worker slowly losing her sight to degenerative illness. Selma lives in a small rented cottage on policeman Bill’s (David Morse) land and saves every penny she makes so that her son can have corrective surgery and thus prevent him inheriting the condition causing Selma’s blindness.

Within the first half hour of Dancer it’s easy to see where Bradshaw’s “manipulative” criticism came from. When we’re introduced to Selma, whose wide eyes and pale complexion make her resemble a china doll, she’s singing “My Favourite Things” from The Sound of Music. From there she endures a constant barrage of unpleasantness, ranging from robbery to unemployment to eviction to imprisonment. It’s not so much a character arc as it is a constant downwards trajectory.

The film’s intentions are never articulated in a way that makes it seem worthwhile.

On a narrative level, the film is impossible to take seriously. Selma is an unbelievably nice character beset by a series of unbelievably horrible events, all of which she accepts without complaint or any ill-will to others. Selma is just too much of a pastiche to relate to as a genuine, flesh and blood character.

That’s not to say that the film is without merit. The film is shot in von Trier’s trademark Dogme aesthetic, using handheld cameras and natural light which adds a sense of claustrophobia as Selma’s eyesight fades and her world shrinks. Set against this no-frills style are expansive, Technicolor musical numbers apparently imagined by Selma as an escape from her everyday life. These interludes (all original scores performed by Björk herself) are both well executed and incredibly jarring against the visual and tonal greyness of the rest of the film.
It’s clear that Von Trier is a talented filmmaker, and the use of huge colourful musical sequences which constituted a breach of his own Dogme manifesto (one of a great many such breaches in the film) shows he’s not afraid to be daring and bold. It’s from this point that it’s worth considering that there may be more going on under the insubstantial surface of Dancer.

Quite what else is going on, however, is unclear. It has been argued that Selma’s struggles are representative of the grim reality faced by immigrants to the United States, particularly when compared to the idealised impression of American life given by Hollywood and particularly the films to which Dancer nods (the above mentioned Sound of Music for example).

Juxtaposing the bleakness of Selma’s life with the imagined musical sequences could be seen as comparing those dreams to the harsher realities, but when Selma’s reality is more akin to a Greek tragedy that message is somewhat undermined. While it seems impossible that Dancer is as insubstantial and superficial as it first appears, particularly when coming from a filmmaker as challenging as von Trier, the film’s true intentions are never articulated in a way that makes the whole thing seem worthwhile.

Von Trier’s long association with Cannes ended in 2011 when the filmmaker made some particularly ill-judged comments regarding the Holocaust that led to his permanent exclusion from the festival. The comments started innocuously enough (von Trier was discussing his German ancestry, which he discovered late in life having been raised by Jewish parents) but as von Trier attempted to backtrack he dug himself a deeper and deeper hole. In a similar way Dancer in the Dark probably contains a valid point somewhere, but it gets lost under a deluge of exaggerated sentiment and suffering.

The result is an imperfect marriage of message and medium, a film which falls somewhere between grandiose melodrama and subversiveness without ever being a good example of either. Despite being a vast improvement on its predecessor (the juvenile and downright offensive “comedy” The Idiots) Dancer never feels anything but unsatisfying to watch.