DANCER
IN THE DARKDANCER
IN THE DARK
Bjork makes Dancer in the Dark work. Von Trier's risk-taking talent for flashy, gripping melodrama is in full force, but it's Bjork's alien charm and eerie warbling that distinguishes his latest tale of a ravaged innocent whose stubborn goodness is sadistically punished. As the near-blind factory worker Selma, who has immigrated to the US in order that her son could have an expensive sight-saving operation, Bjork is almost painfully vulnerable and sympathetic, even as she flexes her unique vocal muscles in several original songs. David Morse is good as Selma's over-extended neighbor Bill, and the cameos by Von Trier regulars Udo Kier, Stellan Skarsgard, and Paprika Steen are welcome.
The half a dozen musical numbers, written off in advance by some critics as more pretentious gimmickry, actually serve to relieve the tension and temporarily lighten the dark skies of impending doom that hang over Selma's story. Von Trier's meta-musical notably enlists film-musical veterans like Catherine Deneuve and Joel Grey and riffs off The Sound of Music, while wisely contextualizing the sudden musical numbers (the incongruity of which are always the most absurd aspect of musicals) as outbursts of Selma's musical-drenched imagination. Because the musicals "happen" only to Selma, although the rest of the cast participate, the main plot can retain a semblance of reality and consequence. But likewise the stress on imagination renders pointless any attempt to treat the movie as a naturalistic docudrama about "real" immigrant life in Washington state in the early 1960's. Americans are used to accepting half-hearted recreations or abstractions of European or Asian historical moments in American films without question--but when a Cannes-hotshot European like Von Trier sets a movie in America (where he has never set foot, being afraid to fly) and intentionally blurs cultural "facts," everyone acts outraged. Dancer in the Dark, like Breaking the Waves, certainly lacks the over-the-top grotesque hilarity of Von Trier's 9-hour series The Kingdom, and its relative humorlessness is too bad--but the battle between Bjork's amazing charisma and the sadism of Von Trier's screenplay provides an emotional workout.