Happy Cannesiversary to "Dancer in the Dark"!!

by Nick Taylor

Happy (belated) Mother’s Day, everybody!! I did not plan on watching Lars von Trier’s Palme-winning musical tragedy at the break of dawn on May 11th, but sometimes fate gives you a funny little coincidence to make a work of art even more resonant than it would already be. Dancer in the Dark ranked high on the list of films I should absolutely have seen by now, based on literally every aspect of my tastes and personality, and the 25th anniversary of its Cannes premiere made for the perfect excuse to finally check this out . . . .

Dancer in the Dark follows Selma (Bjork, in her first and still her only starring film role), a Czech immigrant working in a facsimile of a 1960’s factory in Washington state with her friend Kathy (Catherine Denueve). Selma is a single mother to Gene, a boy of almost 13 years with glasses as thick as hers. They live on the edge of poverty, in a rented trailer home situated on the property of well-respected, allegedly well-off police officer Bill Houston and his wife Linda (David Morse and Cara Seymour). You might notice Morse and Seymour are amoong the only American names in a film very explicitly premised on critiquing America, and this is very much the point! You're simply asked to accept the heavy, unmistakable accents of Björk, Denueve, and Peter Stromare as part of what Von Trier is proposing - it's just as much a fact as Selma's love for her son.

Selma is prone to daydreaming, already a very dangerous habit for someone working with heavy machinery, but even her most alert, pragmatic self has a hard ceiling. Selma is steadily going blind from a degenerative, genetically inherited eye disease. She’s forsaken almost all creature comforts for herself and her son so she can pay for surgery to save Gene’s eyes before it starts ravaging him, with no corresponding impulse towards self-preservation. Selma is determined Gene never learns he has this condition. In fact, she’s incredibly secretive about sharing her plan or admitting how bad her eyesight has become to almost anyone, except the one person who surely deserves to know this the least. Her one true solace is a love of musicals, especially movie musicals. It’s this love that motivates her daydreaming, as she recedes into song-and-dance fantasy sequences which, depending on how you interpret the musicality of the sound mix, may be even more often than we see.

I loved this, if you can believe it. Forgive one last shot fired at Emilia Pérez (and isn't it hilarious how Von Trier's one Oscar nomination and Audiard's sole win were in Best Song?), but this is how you imagine a movie musical and make it into an opera. Hell, it’s a Greek tragedy, a genuinely provocative artwork as entertaining as it is thoughtful and antagonizing. So many different, timeless myths about Americana are laid bare in the ugliest way. I can’t imagine an era in this country’s history when the spectacle of an immigrant getting railroaded by financial desperation, judicial cruelty, police abuse, and the simple crime of being naively, credulously trusting would not feel uncomfortably resonant towards ongoing, real world tragedies. The cruelty depicted is timeless, yet every element of Dancer in the Dark is fused to turn-of-the-millennium challenges to what cinema can and should be.

Formally, you simply couldn’t ask for more from Robby Müller’s camera or Molly Malene Stensgaard and François Gédigier’s editing. The intimacy of Müller’s handheld camera and the sepia-toned varnish of the color grading is a tremendous middle ground for this version of “reality”, applying post-modernist ideas about how a movie can look with the Kansas of The Wizard of Oz. Choosing not just to up the saturation levels during the musical numbers but to set the cameras to fixed points is just ingenious, creating a very different sense of movement while retaining Dancer's overall texture. The unpredictability of individual camera angles and editing on a moment-to-moment basis is astounding, as is Von Trier’s ability to manage these shifts in mood and form without losing any of his film's tragic, inevitable momentum. 

Our beloved Cláudio Alves wrote eloquently about Björk’s performance several years ago, so I’ll try to be quick in my praise without stealing a word or two from his most longest sentences. Her volcanic singing and jubilant, honest playing are integral to Dancer’s emotional wallop. Even as I wish Von Trier’s script hadn’t made Selma this credulous, Björk ensures we understand this woman is constantly choosing to make these sacrifices, rather than passively allowing life's misfortune to pummel her. Through her acting, as well as through her scoring and songwriting, she’s as much an author and steward of Dancer in the Dark as Von Trier is. Well, that’s a little more time on Björk than I intended, but with a performance this special you can’t be brisk. 

To make up for it, I’ll go deeper on Dancer in the Dark’s other major acting achievement: Catherine Deneuve’s watchful, electrically charged supporting turn as Kathy. She’s a fabulous second banana, which isn’t true of every performer who achieved the magnetic, daring career she’d built up over the past four decades as a leading lady. Buñuel, Polanski, and Demy placed her charismatic beauty as the central, unquestionable bearer of the camera’s fascination, not a figure of audience identification but an idealized object to be projected upon. Here, Deneuve plays her audience surrogate with unexpected inflections and poignant energy, making their friendship into the film’s most casually multifaceted relationship. Kathy cares about Selma with all her heart. It’s why she’s willing to work the night shift with her, or narrate the musicals they watch in the movie theater, but she’s so angry and tired of watching Selma grind herself to dust day after day. Kathy’s own discomfort about whether helping Selma is leading this poor woman to her doom, or enabling risks neither of them can afford to take, is made deeply affecting through Deneuve’s acting without always being the primary color of her work or the main focus of a specific scene.

Can I state again that I really loved this film? It's the most Pennies From Heaven shit I've ever seen, and as some of you may know this comparison suggests how easy of a mark I am for what Von Trier is doing but also how special Dancer in the Dark is even relative to other audacious experiments to the musical genre. Holding Pennies up also provides another example of how a film can exploit the thematic and narrative possibilities of a character's grisly murder without quite making the actual killing totally work onscreen. Von Trier leans on cruel, ironic comedy for this passage, and it's hard to imagine he's doing much besides laughing at Selma. Still, it speaks to how well the film has earned our trust before this scene and how expertly it builds afterwards that this hardly matters. It's incredible how much sympathy and dimension Dancer summons for Selma, how it forces us to reckon with its provocation while genuinely earning our attention. She deserves it. And we deserve to hear her songs, if we're brave enough to listen.

Comments

[Wae Mest]

"(Bjork, in her first and still her only starring film role)"

We're just ignoring THE JUNIPER TREE?