Dancer in the Dark Film Rolling Stones Review
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Dancer In The Dark
May contain spoilers
Some reasonable people volition admire Lars von Trier'due south "Dancer in the Dark," and others will despise it. An excellent case can be made for both positions.
The film stars Bjork, the Icelandic pop star, as Selma, a Czech who has emigrated to America, has a modest son, works as a punch-printing operator, is going bullheaded and is saving her money for an operation to forbid her son from going blind, besides. To supplement her income she fastens straight pins to cards for a fraction of a penny per card. She keeps her coin in a candy box. If I told you the moving-picture show was gear up in 1912 and starred Lillian Gish, you might non accept the slightest difficulty in accepting this plot; whether you would like it, of course, would depend on whether you could make the leap of sympathy into the world of silent melodrama.
Only the pic is prepare non in 1912 but in 1964. People nevertheless went blind, but plots had grown more sophisticated by so--and even more so by 2000, when this film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Since it is incommunicable to take the plot seriously on any literal level, it must be approached, I call back, as a deliberate exercise in soap opera. It is valid to dislike it, but not fair to criticize information technology on the grounds of plausibility, because the motion picture has made a deliberate decision to be implausible: The plot is not a fault only a selection.
Selma (Bjork) and her son alive in a house trailer backside the home of Bill (David Morse), a copwho is in thrall to his materialistic wife. He earns, she spends. She thinks he has a large inheritance, and "information technology makes her proud," he confides in Bjork, to come across him visiting his prophylactic deposit box. In fact, the box is empty. The cop likes or loves Selma or something (he is besides gormless to be certain), but betrays her trust. This leads to a deadly confrontation between them, which is stretched out like one of those silent scenes where a victim staggers, speaks, staggers, speaks some more, falls down, curses the fates, tries to climb up, laments, falls once more, etc. Either y'all see this for what information technology is, von Trier deliberately going for result, or it seems silly. Mayhap it seems silly, anyway, only yous tin can admire his nerve.
Selma is followed everywhere by Jeff (Peter Stormare, from the wood chipper scene in "Fargo"). He wants to be her swain. She'south not looking for a beau right now. It is of import to note that both Selma and Jeff are simpleminded. Today we would call them retarded; in 1912, they would have been nigh as smart as many characters in melodrama. Selma also has a good friend named Kathy (Catherine Deneuve--yes, Catherine Deneuve), who figures out that Selma is going blind and wants to aid her, only is defeated by her stubbornness.
The movie begins with Selma rehearsing for a leading office in a local production of "The Audio of Music." It is interrupted by several song-and-dance numbers. Almost of the movie is shot in adequately drab digital video, but the musical numbers have brighter colors. They're gear up in locales like the factory flooring and a railroad bridge. Against their jolly notes must be set the remarkably graphic death that closes the movie.
The beginning press screening at Cannes was at 8:30 a.m. That'southward the screening where all the real moving picture people attend--the critics, festival heads, distributors, exhibitors, film teachers, other directors, etc. (the evening black-tie audition is far more than philistine). Afterward the screening, the auditorium filled with booing and cheering--so equal in measure that people started booing or cheering at each other.
I saturday in my seat, fix to cheer or boo when I made upwards my mind. I let the moving-picture show marinate, and saw information technology once again, and was able to see what von Trier was trying to exercise. Having made a "vow of chastity" with his famous Dogma 95 statement, which calls for films to exist made more simply with hand-held cameras and available light, he is at present divesting himself of modern fashions in plotting. "Dancer in the Dark" is a dauntless throwback to the fundamentals of the movie theatre--to heroines and villains, noble sacrifices and dastardly betrayals. The relatively crude visual wait underlines the movie's abandonment of slick modernism.
"Dancer in the Dark" is not like whatsoever other movie at the multiplex this week, or this year. Information technology is not a "well made movie," is non in "expert taste," is not "plausible" or, for many people, "entertaining." But it smashes downwardly the walls of habit that environment and so many movies. It returns to the wellsprings. It is a bold, reckless gesture. And since Bjork has announced that she will never make another film, it is a adept thing she sings.
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sunday-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.
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Film Credits
Dancer In The Dark (2000)
160 minutes
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