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Dancer
in the Dark
Rated
R
Opens Friday,
Oct. 13.
Dancer's
eclectic international cast includes Catherine Deneuve,
David Morse, Udo Kier, Joel Grey and Jean-Marc Barr.
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Intense. Operatic. Excruciating. Lars Von Trier's Dancer
in the Dark is an extraordinary movie experience--if
you can stand to sit through it.
Part tragic melodrama, part boisterous musical, this Cannes
Film Festival Palme d'Or winner stars Icelandic pop icon
Björk as Selma, a Czech immigrant in circa-1964 Washington
state who's going blind and losing her grip. Although she
barely gets by on her factory-job income, Selma has been
saving to pay for an operation--not for herself, but for
her son, who has inherited the same condition. And if you
think that's sad, just wait: Selma's ultimate fate makes
a Douglas Sirk film seem stoic by comparison.
Selma's only salvation comes through her imagination, which
transports her into elaborate musical numbers in the style
of Busby Berkeley and golden-age Hollywood. "In a musical,"
she says wistfully, "nothing dreadful ever happens."
As with 1996's Breaking the Waves, Dancer in
the Dark is loosely inspired by a fairy tale Von Trier
learned as a child, in which a young girl selflessly martyrs
herself to save others. In both films, Von Trier juxtaposes
elaborate fantasy with drab reality to emphasize the immense
chasm between heaven and earth, imagination and physical
existence. In the fantastical portions of these films, Von
Trier necessarily violates the strictures of the much-publicized
Dogma 95 movement--a so-called "vow of chastity" that favors
no-frills, back-to-basics filmmaking--by using recorded
music and other stylistic devices to render a surreal alternate
realm. But, like its predecessor, the majority of Dancer
in the Dark is filmed with jagged, hand-held digital
video cameras (a Dogma 95 staple) to exhibit, like a documentary,
the caustic oppression of the everyday. Call it America's
saddest home video.
The hand-held digital camera is not only one of the most
visible trappings of Dogma 95 (of which Von Trier is the
unofficial leader) but also the movement's Achilles' heel.
True, the idea of an alternative to glossy Hollywood filmmaking
is both enticing and important, just like the French New
Wave, Italian Neorealism, New German Cinema or other uprisings
from cinema's past. But in using top-flight equipment to
emulate the most amateur of weekend camcorder artists and
then passing it off as a more authentic manner of filmmaking,
the church of Dogma has built its foundation on an act of
fakery. (Not to mention the fact it nauseates you.)
Still, Dancer in the Dark is a picture of undeniable
melodramatic force. Von Trier asks a lot of his audience,
but he casts a profound, dreamlike spell. Björk turns
her acting inexperience into an advantage: She doesn't play
Selma, she becomes her (or vice versa), wearing her
emotions on her tattered sleeve with a haunting genuineness.
(She battled the director throughout and swears she'll never
act again.) And as always, Björk's songs are impishly
sublime, helping Dancer in the Dark to transcend
the mire of Von Trier's visual style.
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