Dancer in the Dark

Dazzling Björk in this indictment against the death sentence, in tight close-ups. This film is a UFO, musical without being.

I have tremendous respect for Lars von Trier's work, and I deeply admire his courage in attempting to fuse drama with musical theater. "Dancer in the Dark" is nothing if not audacious. Unfortunately, ambition alone doesn't make a successful film, and this one fails both as a drama and as a musical.

As drama, the film stumbles on two fundamental levels. First, the handheld, shaky camera movement is completely unnecessary. Von Trier broke other Dogme 95 rules throughout this film, so why cling to this one annoying restriction? The constant jittering ruins suspension of disbelief, pulling us out of the story when we should be immersed in Selma's tragedy. Second, and more damning, there's no redeeming value to the bleak outcome. What have we...

You get a clue as to the slightly surreal nature of the drama right from a start that sees Björk and Catherine Deneuve doing their own amateur dramatics rehearsals of The Sound of Music! It turns out that the former, Selma, is a Czech immigrant to the USA who is suffering from a progressive blindness that she has passed on to her young son. She knows that he still has time to have corrective surgery, but she has to earn the cash to pay for that so works at a tool assembly plant and saves every cent she can. She has a small group of friends, mainly just Kathy (Deneuve) and Jeff (Peter Stormare) who would like to develop their relationship despite her obvious, though always polite, reluctance. It might be that she could have achieved her goal...