Film: Dancer in the Dark

The movie Dancer in the Dark focuses on Selma, a Czech immigrant, living in a small industrial town in Washington state in 1964. She is focused on saving enough money for her 12-year-old son to get an operation to prevent him from going blind. He inherited the same disease that she has and it will make him go blind if it is not treated just as it made her go blind. She works two jobs to save up enough money and deals with her struggles by daydreaming song and dance musicals in which she and everyone around her contributes. Examples of this are the song and dance routines she does in the factory, on and around the train, in the courtroom, and in the prison hallway.

Lars Von Trier directs the movie and says that it is the third part in what he calls his “golden-heart trilogy”. The first two parts of the trilogy are the movies Breaking the Waves and The Idiots. Goldenheart was a picture book Lars read as a child. The story is about a little girl who goes out in the woods on her own with things in her pocket. She meets people along the way and shares her belongings with them until she is naked and has nothing. The story ends with the line “I’ll manage all right anyway”. Both Goldenheart and Lars’ trilogy involve a martyr who suffers and makes sacrifices to advance a principle or to help someone else. Dancer in the Dark’s Selma played by BjÃ?¶rk “has a more rebellious piece of mind than her predecessors (in the first two movies of the trilogy) but she can neither steer nor escape her fate.” (BjÃ?¶rkman, 1999)

Lars says that his method of working in the movie was also used by Carl Dreyer. Dreyer was a Danish movie director and screenwriter who directed silent films such as The Passion of Joan Arc in 1928. “He strived towards an always bigger simplification. With the difference that he never let his actors come with any input at all. That goes against everything I am trying to do here. I want to give the actors the freedom to build on with their own ideas. It’s similar to a game, sort of ‘cops and robbers,’ where the conflict is clearly defined from the start,” said Lars. He explained that he followed the same guidelines as his last movies. In the first takes, he instructed actors to stick to the script as close as possible but in every new take he gave permission for the actors to rework the script. “The scenes that I now am most pleased with are the ones that are completely improvised, where we have gone very far away from the original dialogue. Catherine Deneuve (who plays Kathy) is horribly good at improvising!” Lars also mentioned in the interview that unlike most movies, his movie was shot on video and in Panavision-format and then transferred to film. He was extremely pleased with the results and says that someday every movie will be shot on video. (BjÃ?¶rkman, 1999)

Lars said that he used one hundred video cameras scattered throughout the shooting site for the musical numbers. “The advantage with the hundred cameras is that we get everything we expected out of the scene, and on top of that, we get all these randomly selected images, pictures captured as it happens, which can be very speaking and expressive.” (BjÃ?¶rkman) He said that if he had done a musical ten years ago he would have done it the traditional way with dolly shots and crane shots. (Von Trier)

In an interview, BjÃ?¶rk explains her role in the movie and why she was picked. “The role is in a way designed for meâÂ?¦ I think the reason I got the role is because [Lars] he sees something in me that is in the role. I haven’t dared to askâÂ?¦. [he is able to see] that I feel more comfortable inside a song than I do in real life”. BjÃ?¶rk explains that sometimes she is known as the world’s “little Miss Different”. “I’ve lived with the label ‘different’ since I was a kid. I’ve always laughed at it. And I don’t feel bad of people making fun of me. OrâÂ?¦I really like it if I should be honest.” (BrÃ?Â¥stedt & BÃ?¶rjesson) BjÃ?¶rk doesn’t like retakes and would prefer playing her scene only once. This is the reason why she uses such seriousness in the movie because she has taken Selma’s fate to herself. (BjÃ?¶rkman) Her acting paid off; she won the Best Actress award at the year 2000 Cannes Film Festival for her performance in Dancer in the Dark. She also won the Best Actress award at the 2000 European Film Awards as well as the Best Cinematic Breakthrough award at the 2000 Online Film Critics Society Awards. She also was nominated for the 2001 Golden Globe’s Best Actress Award. (Schmitz)

Dancer in the Dark “is a brave throwback to the fundamentals of the cinema – to heroines and villains, noble sacrifices and dastardly betrayals. This relatively crude visual look underlines the movie’s abandonment of slick modernism.” The 140-minute movie is “not like any other movie at the multiplex this week, or this year. It is not a ‘well-made film,’ is not in ‘good taste,’ is not ‘plausible’ or for many people, ‘entertaining.’ But it smashes down the walls of habit that surround so many movies. It returns to the wellsprings. It is a bold, reckless gesture,” said Roger Ebert in a review that appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times. He gave the movie 3 Ã?½ stars. (Ebert)

CNN described the movie as “a perplexing film that contains moments of astonishing powerâÂ?¦. You get the uneasy feeling that he’s just as happy to aggravate people as he is to touch themâÂ?¦. This movie, for all its flaws, is a unique journey, and needs to be experienced rather than explained. Hang on tight, open your mind, and give it a shot.” (Tatara) The movie is full of emotion and can be interpreted different ways by different people. “There were those who saw it as a cynical shock-opera from a manipulative charlatan, others wept openly at its scenes of raw emotion and heart-rending intensity.” (Wise) “It is one of the most miserable musicals ever madeâÂ?¦. It was set in the U.S. but made in Sweden by a Danish director who has never crossed the Atlantic.” (Filmfour.com)

Dancer in the Dark’s musical numbers were excellent. The movie was pretty depressing however and even though I knew from the feel of the movie that it would have a bad ending, I was hoping as the movie progressed that it would end on a somewhat good note. The movie was too long and drawn out, in my opinion, and the jittery movements of the camera reminded me of old home videos. However, the director did a superb job developing the theme of the movie, which is self-sacrifice. Selma’s unselfishness and sacrifices have allowed her son to get the surgery he needed so he will not go blind.

The director also did a good job showing the poor working conditions in the textile mills in the 1960’s. We all have dreams and goals we want to achieve but unfortunately they cannot always be attained and we must suffer even if we have the best intentions, especially when we are trying to help somebody else.

The movie won the Best Foreign Language Film award at the 2001 Independent Spirit Awards. It also won for Best European Feature by the 2000 European Film Awards. Not only that, but it won the Palme d’Or award at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. It was nominated for the 2001 Golden Globes for BjÃ?¶rk as Best Actress and for Best Song “I’ve Seen It All”. The same song also was nominated for the 73rd Annual Academy Awards. (Schmitz)