Film - Jonathan Romney says Bjork is silly
Relations were so strained between Lars von Trier and his star Bjork while shooting Dancer in the Dark that, at one particularly stressful moment, the Icelandic singer apparently "ate her blouse". When the film was premiered in Cannes this year - winning the Palme d'Or and the Best Actress prize for Bjork - many critics ate theirs, too. Dancer in the Dark has divided audiences like no other film in ages. Some people have emerged in tears at the film's heart-tugging simplicity. Personally, I'm with the critic who announced that it was the worst musical he had ever seen, "and that includes Springtime for Hitler".
Some people tell me that older, hardened hearts simply don't get the film. It may indeed be a matter of age, because Dancer in the Dark strikes me as a genuinely infantile work. The story is sketched in the broadest melodramatic strokes, invoking only elemental emotions - the joy of rhythm, the pleasures of nature, mother love. The heroine Selma (Bjork) is a rosy-cheeked innocent, so zestful that she makes Maria in The Sound of Music - Selma's favourite musical - look like a sulking Goth chick. But, coming from the seasoned provocateur von Trier, the gaucheness is more than suspect: it looks like a celluloid sophisticate's jaded nostalgia for the thrill of the pure and direct.
Selma - "Silly Selma", as she calls herself in song - is a single mother, a Czech immigrant working in a factory in small-town America, in what seems to be a fantasy version of the 1950s or 1960s. She loves musicals almost as much as she loves her ten-year-old boy, Gene, but both mother and son are losing their sight, and she keeps the money for his eventual operation tucked away in a biscuit tin. Her neighbour, the local cop Bill (David Morse, the most substantial performance here), seems like a nice guy, but he has his own troubles; before long, they are raining on Selma, too.
Blindness, troublesome neighbours and the heavy hand of justice notwithstanding, it's not such a bad world. Dancer in the Dark adheres to the moral pattern of melodrama, in which individual aspects of life can be unspeakably awful, in which infants must turn chimney sweeps and wicked landlords cast mothers into the snow, without the overall order of things being anything but reassuring. So, while fate is stacked against Selma, most of the characters go out of their way to make her lot a little gentler. Her best friend (played by Catherine Deneuve) signs on to the night shift specially to give Selma a hand, and the director of an amateur production of The Sound of Music is obliging enough to employ a drummer purely on rhythm-crazy Selma's whim, even though she is playing only a second-string nun. Everything is so sweet and tender that, when nastiness intrudes, it is all the more distressing. You may find yourself reaching for the sick bag, rather than the Kleenex.
Selma is a spiritual sister to the heroine of von Trier's 1996 film Breaking the Waves, a powerful but contentious story about a woman who martyrs herself sexually in order to save her husband. Von Trier's obsession with virtuous female suffering - his "Patient Griselda" complex - makes sense if you think of his films not as conventional dramas, but as cinematic operas. In its grand emotional gestures, Dancer in the Dark is as close to opera as modern cinema gets, but, as a bona fide musical, it leaves much to be desired - not least because Bjork's songs are grating, melodically unmemorable and lyrically banal ("Remember what I have said/Remember about the bread/Do this do that, make your bed").
Almost any cue will turn Selma's daily grind into a full-blown song-and-dance routine. The clanking of machinery sends the whole shop floor swinging and hoofing; a walk along railway tracks takes on the heroic pastoral sweep of a Sixties eastern bloc musical. Von Trier seems to have another sort of musical in mind - those made in the Sixties by the late Jacques Demy, who, in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, proved that the most unpromising provincial settings could become a stage for rapturous fiestas more than the equal of MGM's finest.
The Demy connection in Dancer in the Dark is his regular star Deneuve, who seems an unnecessarily opulent casting choice. In overalls and headscarf, French cinema's most regal diva becomes less a character than a gracious fairy godmother guest star. As for the song sequences, they don't work by any conventional standards. Von Trier's grand formal gesture is the fussy cutting between no fewer than 100 digital cameras which, throughout the film, are stuck anywhere that von Trier and the photographer Robby Muller damn well please - up walls, in a river, on a bicycle wheel. Vincent Paterson's all-jumping, all-tapping, all spanner-wielding choreography looks as though it might be galvanising, but the editing works so epileptically against any sense of space and rhythm that it feels like an act of wilful self-sabotage.
The bottom line is, can you accept Bjork as a tragic heroine? Festival juries adore her: a non-actor playing with ingratiating naturalness to the camera, too infatuated with her own disorderly realness to play the game of mere plausibility. This wildly mannered turn, half ten-year-old, half granny gnome, isn't helped by a distractingly weird accent - not so much Czech as Martian Cockney.
I can buy Julie Andrews as an Austrian novice nun, at a pinch, but you have to draw the line somewhere, and I think it should be drawn at this ugly, self-indulgent folly. Silly Selma, indeed.
Dancer in the Dark (15) is currently at the Curzon Soho, Gate Notting Hill, Screen on the Hill and Ritzy Cinema in London
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