Danish director Lars von Trier's neo-musical is a radical take on the old song and dance. By Manohla Dargis
FEW FILMS this year will inspire as much intense love or pasionate loathing as Dancer in the Dark, the latest cause célèbre from director-provocateur Lars von Triers. Set in a small Washington town in 1963, the film stars pop singer Björk as Selma, a single-mother who's plagued with the sort of miserable luck and extravagant bad faith that turns mortals into either martyrs or loons, and sometimes both. Selma is going blind and trying to save up for an operation that will keep her son from the same fate. But she has lousy intuition and is, perhaps, just a little stupid. There's a calamitous theft and an unnecessary murder, and it isn't long before Selma finds herself marching toward death. Or, rather, reaching for the high note and a two-step shuffle since -- and this is the twist that furiously divided audiences at Cannes this year when the film won the Palme d'Or -- Dancer in the Dark is also a musical.
In 1995, von Trier and a handful of his Danish collegues issued a "Vow of Chastity" that took the international critical establishment by storm. With scorched-earth bombast and a puckish tone, the group, calling itself Dogma 95, railed against the old filmmaking ways -- including nominal sins such as artificial light -- in favor of more ostensibly truthful moviemaking. The battle cry was at once frivolous ("Out with genre!" demanded the Dogmatics) and self-serving (the vow put the group on the world map); but the radicalism, or at least the rhetoric, wasn't without interest, in particular for film lovers grown weary of movies that seemed increasingly manufactured with all the art and soul of Pop-Tarts.
There's no denying the art of Dancer in the Dark; the conceptual reach and technological radicalism of von Trier's film are breathtaking. Directors have been fiddling with the musical for years, but few have been bold enough to try to imagine what a full-on effort would look like in a post-MTV world. In some respects, von Trier has reconsidered the musical in familiar fashion (even as he broke his antigenre rule in the effort). The numbers in Dancer in the Dark reflect Selma's hopes and desires in much the same way that Gene Kelly's in An American in Paris did, the difference being that von Trier has also stripped the musical of its romance and, more perversely, its optimism. The film glitters like a diamond, brilliant and cold. g
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