A Review of Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark
A problem one faces with writing reviews is not when writing something one feels moderately about, a steady mind is exactly what one needs to weigh in on an object’s qualities, strong emotions however have proven to be the bane of all reviewers, especially when the needle points strongly at the positive direction. At least with strong hatred, one would still be in possession with the benefit of doubt, giving us the luxury to still at some degree think rationally, yet with strong fondness as with strong affections, we must be very careful as to not fall into infatuation and committing the sin of absolution.
The writer fears however that Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark might be one such instances. Every single step from this point on must be approached with meticulous attention to detail and steady methodology.
Dancer in the Dark is a reality anchored musical melodrama that was released at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, immediately winning the festival’s prestigious Palm d’Or for Best Picture. With such promises, we have to analyse not just the film’s emotionally charged plot and storyline, but also the brilliant exploitation of the cinematic language through which von Trier achieved them.
We follow the life Czechoslovakian immigrant, Selma Ježková (Björk), in a small town on the State of Washington during the 1960s as she suffers from genetic gradual blindness and works herself to the bone at a sink factory, taking odd jobs at the sides too, to save up on money with which she hopes will eventually provide her young son, Gene (Vladica Kostic), with the necessary surgery to spare him from his own inevitable impending blindness.
As it is a part of his Golden Heart Trilogy with Breaking the Waves (1996) and Idiots (1998), Selma’s character is based out of von Trier’s faulty childhood copy of the Guld Hjerte, a fairytale book where a young girl gives all that she has to help everyone but herself, before receiving magical compensations in everyone else’s widely distributed copies, a fact von Trier has all but chosen to ignore. And like the Guld Hjerte, Selma is innocent and gullible, her land lord eventually takes advantage of her and steals her hard earned cash only to then beg her to kill him, a request that will cost her her own life as she faces death penalty for the crime.
Her only escape is her musical daydreams where she is free to sing joyously in the most inconspicuous of places. Von Trier highlights the two realities by shooting them in digital video with two contrasting methods: the hand-held dynamic camera for Selma’s reality and still cameras for her musical reveries.
Selma’s strong reality is shot in von Trier’s trademark hand-held cinema vérité camera handling that allows you to intimately participate in the scenes through close-ups, mid-shots, and jump-cut edits. This documentary approach allows us to focus on the characters words, often hushed intimacy and their smallest of gestures or expressions with depth. Such as when Catherine Deneuve’s character, Kathy (Selma’s Best friend), covers her mouth with her hand to stifle a worried cry as she sees a nearly blind Selma use a railroad track to guide herself home, or when she dances two fingers across the palm of Selma’s hand at the movie theatre to convey the essence of the Busby Berkeley’s dance number playing out on the screen in front of them. And if these small moments are so emotionally charged, imagine what von Trier is able to make you feel in the grand segments.
While her musical daydreams are shot on multiple still cameras (mythicised to almost 100 cameras at a time) which employ no motion at all. Making you feel at times as though you are watching through a CCTV due to how the cinematic rhythm of the sequences is provided almost entirely by the pace of cuts made from one static camera viewpoint to another. Von Trier’s reasoning is that setting up a lot of cameras and allowing the action to pass in front of them (or not), would retain a sense of capturing a “live” event and deny himself of the mannered, sweeping crane shots or other clichéd camerawork that would normally be utilised to film a song-and-dance sequence in a musical.
This technique works, especially at a metaphoric level in allowing us to feel viscerally how Selma is only on stable ground while in her fantasy world. It also offers an omniscient point of view of her fantasies, releasing us from physical bounds and effectively viewing the scene from an “all knowing” perspective that is consistent with a dream. Choreographer Vincent Paterson points out on the commentary track during the “I’ve Seen It All” sequence, that we are able to see Selma climb onto the train from a collection of images cut together from a large number of perspectives, most of which is from one take of Björk’s performance. This is made possible only because there were so many cameras capturing that performance from different angles.
However, we must admit that some of the scenes do feel constricted as we see characters move out of frame and getting half of their actions cut off from view. Von Trier has said that one of the things he learned from using the “100 cameras” technique is that there can never be too many cameras, he’d like to have had a thousand or even ten thousand, something he’ll later try to perfect with automavision in The Boss of It All (2006), fortunately for Dancer in the Dark, camera work is not the only thing which supports the musical scenes.
The colour palette expands from desaturation into greatly vibrant warm tones and the sound system’s surround channels dramatically engulf you in the musical scenes, creating an emotional/psychological dissonance that echoes just how much inner strength is demanded from Selma to continue on with her cruel reality.
Von Trier becomes even more creative with his technical skills nearing the end of the film as Selma sings “My Favorite Things” (from The Sound of Music) before facing her death. The camerawork switches to the locked-down “100 cameras” style, indicating that she is escaping once again from her grim reality into the safety and comfort of song, however, two song-sequences later, she again begins to sing a cappella while death is inevitable but this time the cinematography refuses to switch to the “100 cameras” style, signalling to us that finally, Selma’s circumstances are so grim that even the power of music and fantasy cannot make things right for her.
Selma is the perfect victim. After she commits murder halfway through the film we will spend the rest of our time watching her be systematically victimised, and as her childlike qualities engage with our protective instincts, we will cross the line between tragedy and defensive derision. This powerful-emotionally charged film can however at the same time appear to be nauseating or laughably over-the-top, it requires us to look past the shallowness of the plot to the emotional through-line underneath.
Like how Selma believes that it is necessary to keep her twelve-year-old son, Gene (a metaphor alluding to “genetics” or perhaps “Gene Kelly”) condition a secret from him, otherwise he might worry and that would lead to the disease becoming incurable. Ultimately this reasoning which Selma goes through great lengths for (prosecuted and eventually killed) does not matter, what does is that she believes in it. Viewers who can’t or won’t make that leap of faith will have a hard time getting anything out of this movie. Lars von Trier has said that viewers can be taken farther on their emotions than their intellects would consider reasonable.
Dancer in the Dark manipulates you. At one point Selma describes how a Hollywood film conventionally manipulates us: ”it goes really big and the camera goes, like, out of the roof…,” she says, making reference to the sweeping camera moves and swelling strings on the soundtrack that mark a conventional film’s emotional landscape, something this movie does not do. Except in its fantasy musical song-and-dance numbers, there is no underscore music of any kind, and the only visible big camera sweep is done at the very end after her death to allude to her previously mentioned comment in which Selma refers to how she hates that she always knows when a movie will end through those camera movements.
Most of the manipulation is of course done at the hands of Selma (appearing in almost every scene of the film’s entire 141 minutes run time), brought to life by Björk who received the Cannes’ Best Female Performance award for the film. Although originally only approached by von Trier to compose the film’s original score, Björk soon found herself engaging us with her girlish vulnerability yet matronly resolve, making it impossible for the audience to take their eyes off of the screen.
Björk presented us with Selma who grew up with the American dream on screen, an overall theme addressed by the film, only to then inhabit the country as a poor undereducated immigrant who still naively hangs on to the idea of an American dream by participating in the local theatre’s rendition of the Sound of Music and occasionally drudging off into musical daydreams. Her musical dream sequences have been criticised by many reviewers as being ineffective, lacking the sweeping dreamlike quality to entirely be an escape from reality, and yet this is the exact purpose of the scenes. They are not meant to be an escape, they are merely amplifications of her state of mind.
In her song, “I’ve Seen It All”, she attempts to convince her suitor, Jeff, that she doesn’t care that she’s going blind. On the surface, this song appears to be a simple, traditional catalogue song in the mould of “My Favorite Things” or “Seventy-Six Trombones.”, however, it contains an uncommonly complex mix of emotions. Much of its power comes from our realisation that Selma is most likely trying to convince herself as much as she is trying to convince Jeff. We also realise that going blind is truly awful for her, because why else would she have sacrificed so much to save her son from that fate? And yet, at another, more profound level, she has already accepted her impending blindness, and so it truly is no longer important. The song encapsulates conflicting thoughts and presents them with a compelling combination of hopefulness and resignation.
Her final number, ”107 Steps”, possesses a fatalistic function similar to that of classical minimalism. The song’s ever-ascending counting from 1 to 107 is like the countdown of a clock and signals the unstoppable forward momentum leading toward the impending tragedy that awaits her. The fantasies of affection and kindness she imagines while this counting plays out, and the hopefulness for a happy ending that would be possible if this sequence were part of a classic 1940’s musical, are twice as tragic for our knowledge that this is not a classic musical, and no such happy-ending hope is warranted. Even so, when the inevitable end comes, it still seems shocking for a movie to be willing to take things so far. Even Dennis Potter, who brought his Pennies From Heaven characters to the brink, didn’t, in the end, shove them over the edge.
So, in the end, we are left pondering just what it is that we are supposed to take away from watching this wrenching tale of woe? Dancer in the Dark is a terrifyingly dark look into the world of cinema, the visual and sound experience that we go through in parallel with life, life as a staged recorded act. In the movie all is justified as at the end Selma does achieve her life’s goal to save her son from blindness. It was her only reason for living and her final sacrifice earns her well. Dancer in the Dark is sadness as catharsis.
