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Susan Granger's review of "DANCER IN THE DARK" (Fine Line Features)
Love it or hate it, you gotta admire its audacity! Danish director Lars von Trier who, back in 1995, co-authored the Dogma manifesto, demanding that cinema be purified of tricks and illusions and go back-to-basics, has come up with a bizarre homage to the Hollywood musical. Making her film debut, the Icelandic pop singer Bjork plays Selma, a Czech immigrant working at a factory in the Pacific Northwest in the 1960s. An avid admirer of American musicals, she fantasizes song-and-dance routines as she goes about her depressing daily existence. It's her "emotional landscape." One complication: because of a congenital condition, she's also going blind, as will her 12 year-old son (Vladica Kostic) if she cannot raise the money for surgery to save his sight. Which makes her lyrics, "I've seen it all. There's nothing left to see," particularly poignant. Catherine Deneuve is a supportive co-worker and Peter Stromare is a besotted suitor but, when a treacherous neighbor (David Morse) steals her stash of cash, Selma panics, commits a grotesque crime and faces a bleak future. Like Emily Watson in "Breaking the Waves," Bjork is a compelling, elfin creature playing a stubborn child/woman trapped in an irrational paradox of reality versus fantasy. In addition, of course, Bjork composed the music. Curiously, von Trier contradicts his own Dogma purity principles by creating an improbable, deliberately stylized film using not only 100 cameras in a dance sequence but also recorded music to which Bjork lip-synchs; I've heard there are 110 tracks in every song. Winner of the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, on the Granger Movie Gauge, "Dancer in the Dark" is a fascinating but, ultimately, frustrating 7. It's a musical melodrama that's blatantly manipulative in its overt sentimentality.
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