Dancer In The Dark (2000)

“Nothing bad ever happens in musicals” 

It is not often that I watch musicals, partly for the quote above feeling true even if it is not actually true. But a paradoxical mixture of Dogme 95 and musicals (The Dogme 95 manifesto actually forbids music) has to be worth watching, especially with Bjork's one and only major acting role.

The main character is a woman, named Selma, from Czechoslovakia (at this time, that was a single country) who has moved to the USA to live her life with her pre-teenage son. She works in a factory, which she finds simple enough but getting harder and harder due to her deteriorating eyesight. She is, essentially, becoming blind and so is trying to hide that fact so that she can continue working and earning money. Little by little, she is earning money but clearly not to lavish on herself or her son as they live in a trailer at the back of a couple's home. This couple are a little more lavish due to the inheritance that they have picked up.

As in so many situations, all is not as it seems and Selma is working to earn enough to pay for a doctor to perform an operation on her son that he does not yet know he needs. Her deteriorating eyesight is hereditary and so will afflict him, something that she would like to stop and is part of the reason for moving to America - the other is her love of musicals. At the same time, her landlord is in a money trap that he dare not tell his materialistic wife about. How could that resolve itself?

I don't want to say too much but we rarely spiral up in films...

As a film, it is quite a melancholy (though maybe not quite Melancholia) one with Selma's situation played out with her slowly realising that her eyesight is going and that she is losing what she could do. The musical parts grow as her eyesight goes as she enters that dreamlike stance more readily as she escapes from her normal life - or daydreaming. Obviously, the quality of the music is dependant on your own taste for Bjork but I am a fan of hers and a fan of the music here (although the album versions, from "Selmasongs" have better singers than the film versions). As Selma explains, she hears music in the sounds and the music is usually created, or at least started from the background noises of wherever she happens to be. It is actually a jarring transition, and there are visual changes too with a slightly more saturated look and more steady camera work. I think this is to differentiate between the dreary normal life she has and the slightly more filmic image she sees in her head. Visually, the film is generally quite dour with most of it set in very simple rooms or the factory but the musical segments do have a song and dance and a particular scene on a train bridge has got a remarkable sense of movement from the nearby train. I think it is to do with the camera movement but it is a very well done scene.

The film did rather well at Cannes in 2000 and picked up the Palme d'Or, along with the Best Actress award for Björk and I was very impressed by the acting. As so much of the film is quite despairing, it had to show that feeling of defeat very clearly which I think Bjork managed sensationally. Counter-intuitively, a lot of that despair was best captured as a result of the fleeting moments of joy and happiness that you see on her face, juxtaposing with the sullen face normally. As the character goes through the film, you sense her very simple moral framework and I guess it is meant to make her seem like an innocent child although she is clearly not. There are questions of b;lame but it would be very difficult to see her as innocent although there is an element of sympathy for her situation. I found her compelling throughout and very watchable up to the bitter end.

As the film is morally dubious, it is not clear how much sympathy should be had for all of the characters but I am not sure clear delineations are either Von Trier's strong point or a real necessity in films.
It is a brilliant film with a great feeling of unease and a genuinely memorable ending. If that is not reason enough to watch it, I don't think it has much more.
It did have a very mixed reception on release, with The Guardian apparently saying it was "one of the worst films, one of the worst artworks and perhaps one of the worst things in the history of the world."

You can see the trailer here:

And the music video for "I've Seen It All" is here too: