Dancer in the Dark
Written and Directed by Lars Von Trier
Starring Bjork, Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, Peter Stormare

          Lars Von Trier has become one of the most important living film auteurs of our time, and one of my favorites as well.   His hand-held, jump cut, voyeuristic style makes his characters and their worlds so believable, you might think you were watching a documentary sans interviews.   In his new moral-heavy film, Dancer in the Dark, this talent for realism has an effect on the featured musical numbers that makes them seem even more absurd than numbers found in an original Hollywood musical. 
       Bjork plays Selma, a near-blind Czechoslovakian who brings her young son to the American northwest in the 1960’s in need of better healthcare for his own detiorating eyesight.   The two of them live in a trailer owned by police officer Bill (Morse) and his girlfriend who loves to spend his inheritance.   Selma works in a factory with her fellow-Communist friend Kathy (Deneuve), where she spends too much time daydreaming about musicals and not enough time acknowledging Jeff (Stormare), a suitor who would do anything for her, the least of which is drive her home from work.    
       The unfolding story among these amazing people involves too many unexpected turns to go into that magnify the theme of selfless delusion way beyond its usage in Von Trier’s Breaking The Waves(which started off the “Golden Heart Trilogy” which concludes with Dancer), creating a good guy/bad guy relationship between those who make sacrifices to help and honor others and those who greedily take advantage of people and their money. 
       Another theme is found in one of Selma’s songs in which she argues, unintentionally contrasting the Oscar-winning film American Beauty, that you needn’t have eyes to see beauty.  The musical numbers, which don’t come about until midway through the film, are sparked when Selma’s eyesight is going fast and her hearing is improving so that her ears pick up rhythms in everything from machinery to locomotives to pencils sketching out a court scene on paper.  While the atmosphere found in an old Hollywood musical is one of expectation for the next unavoidable number, the abrupt song and dance found here, even with their natural industrial beats, seem as uncomfortably out of place as they would in real life. Von Trier keeps them away from real life, too, tucking them only in Selma’s mind. 
       Being familiar with the video to Bjork’s song “It’s So Quiet”, which pays homage to musicals, I expected the same feel in the songs of Dancer in the Dark.   Instead she crafts a soundtrack full of powerfully nonchalant songs that often seem to be talking to themselves.  Apart from her brilliant singing performances, Bjork gives a beautifully moving and innocent performance as Selma, comparative to Emily Watson’s debut in Breaking the Waves that I am saddened by her decision never to act again. 
       Lars Von Trier’s motto for filmmaking is that “a film should be like a rock in the shoe”.  His films are not near as annoying, but I can agree that they can be unbearable at times while still attracting utmost attention, even if that attention is infamously split among critics.   Dancer in the Dark has a number of scenes that are hard on the eyes and the ears, not like the trend in movies today to disgust or shock, but merely to effect an audience in the same way life does with its own hard times and happy times.  
       A quote of Selma’s near the beginning of the film is followed upon in the ending.  She says that when she was a young girl watching musicals, she would leave right before the finale, because she wanted the story to go on forever without there ever being a last song.   I feel the same way about this powerful film.  I never wanted Dancer in the Dark to end, to have its final number.

"They can't sentence me to death. I'm too damn cute!"