October 5–12, 2000

movie shorts

Dancer in the Dark

Björk is the reason to see Dancer in the Dark, whether you usually like her or not. Granted, any encounter with the ex-Sugarcube tends to be strange. She surely has a wondrous sense of timing and self, equally adept at purring pop ditties, belting show tunes, technologizing her tremendous voice until it sounds not-quite-human and then — as a visual incarnation — spinning and gesticulating like some sweet-natured and slowed-down whirling dervish. All that, and she’s Tricky’s ex-girlfriend, too.

Björk’s performance in Lars von Trier’s beat-down musical is a revelation, not so much because she demonstrates craft or creativity — though she does show much of both, in raw, vibrant, sometimes unbelievable ways — but because she exposes her brilliant, almost otherworldly, comprehension of music as a means of feeling, seeing and being in the world.

She battles two sets of conventions to do so. Dancer adheres to 1) von Trier’s own Dogme 95 edicts against "tricks" (which basically mean the cameras are handheld, colors dreary, lines sometimes improvised and soundtrack — aside from the dance numbers, of course — more or less naturalistic); and 2) the excesses of Hollywood musicals, complete with a spectacularly melodramatic and implausible plot interrupted by lavish, generally outrageous song-and-dance numbers.

This plot is actually pretty awful, sort of Breaking the Waves 2. The female protagonist, here named Selma, is dreadfully beleaguered by her life circumstances, and yet maintains her faith, if not precisely in God (recall Emily Watson’s Bess conversing with herself in God’s voice), then in the moral codes she sets for herself.

A Czech immigrant eking out a living in rural Washington state in 1964, Selma is as plucky as they come, though she’s fast going blind from some unexplained genetic imperfection that she has passed on to her 10-year-old son, the ominously named Gene (Vladan Kostic). In order to scrape together the money she needs to pay for the boy’s sight-saving operation, Selma works long days in a factory that presses metal plates, nights putting bobby pins in those little cardboards on which they’re sold (10,000 cards at a time), and every in-between moment imagining herself into a miraculous, melodious world where endings are always happy. One of her precious few pleasures is rehearsing to play Maria in a local theater production of The Sound of Music (and there’s little as haunting as Björk singing, so haltingly, so achingly, "When the dog bites, when the bee stings…").

Selma is supported in her many survival efforts by her best friend and coworker, Kathy (Catherine Deneuve, so exquisite even in her factory overalls that she draws attention to the film’s elaborate artifice and absurdities), who helps her cover up at work as her sight gives out, goes to Busby Berkeley movies and "spells out" the dance moves in Selma’s palm, and even joins the theater cast, though Kathy’s not exactly comfortable singing or dancing. As well, Selma has a doting, if awkward, male admirer in Jeff (Peter Stormare) and a seeming good friend in her landlord Bill (David Morse). One late night, Bill confides to Selma that his wife Linda (Cara Seymour) has run through his inheritance in a few short years, and he fears that his meager salary as a small town cop won’t keep her.

Bill is briefly moved when Selma confesses her own woes to him, but he’s another version of the Stellan Skarsgård character in Breaking the Waves; distressed, damaged and feeling victimized, he believes someone owes him, big time. And Selma is at once too unwitting and generous, too confused and childish — too blind, I suppose — to refuse him outright: When cowardly Bill pleads with Selma to "have mercy," she does the absolutely wrong thing, mistaking it to be the right one, or at least, the result of having no choice. The movie spends the rest of its running time making you (if not Selma) regret her blindness, punishing her, devastatingly and repeatedly. The precise workings of this imbroglio are both intricate and ridiculous, the outcome pathetic and drudgey.

But it hardly matters. Björk — or more precisely, Björk singing, dancing and imagining her way beyond the mundane business of making sense in a mere movie — is astonishing. She is a rarity, an actual musician in a musical, making songs out of beats she hears in everyday events and objects: factory machines, railroad trains, air vents, her own heartbeat. Her sheer joy in all this music, found and conjured, is inspired and gorgeous, even as the film around her abides by generic rules. Selma’s flights into wacky fancy occur at the most dire moments, when her eyesight completely fails, when she’s confronted with a terrible crime and then, when she finds herself in a courtroom with DA Zeljko Ivanek and the chief prosecution witness, a Czech musical actor played by Joel Grey: Everyone dance-steps and swoons cartoonishly when Selma half-wails, half-sings from a tabletop, "I’m in-no-cent!" Equally incredible is Selma’s can’t-love-you duet with Jeff, "I’ve Seen It All" (on Selmasongs, the film’s not-quite soundtrack, Björk sings with Thom Yorke), a dance number coordinated with the sounds of a passing train and the tool-wielding laborers riding on it, as she insists that going blind is, in some make-believe grand scheme, unimportant: "What is there to see?"

And this is the point: What is there to see, in a world so filled with misery and horror? Surely, the film itself has been cited as one of these terrible things: It’s generated controversy from day one, with reports of disagreements between Björk and the notoriously contrary von Trier on the set (originally asked to compose and produce the score, she became so enraptured with Selma that she and von Trier agreed that she absolutely had to play her). Then came the booing at this year’s Cannes Festival, when Dancer won the Palme d’Or and Björk the Best Actress prize. And then, more recently, U.K movie theaters have promised patrons their money back if they don’t like the movie after at least 30 minutes of viewing. This peculiar policy suggests that you must see at least some of it before you make a decision as to its morality, its watchability, its legitimacy as art or politics or (admittedly extreme) entertainment. Such generous contracting with viewers is unlikely to become popular with theater-owners, but it does suggest an unusual faith in the power of seeing, of understanding. In any case, Björk is sensational, combining visual and audio potencies in a way that very few artists have even considered doing.

(Ritz at the Bourse)