← Back to Reviews
in
DANCER IN THE DARK ****
Dancer in the Dark is the final installment in Lars Von Trier’s A Heart of Gold trilogy, the first being Breaking the Waves with Emily Watson and the second being The Idiots with Bodil Jørgense. Each movie in the trilogy features a female lead who makes a tremendous sacrifice for the people they love. In this movie, the woman is Selma Jezkova (Björk), an immigrant from Czechoslovakia who, after falling in love with American musicals, makes her way to the state of Washington to live the American dream.
Selma is sweetness personified with an ability to escape the harshness of the world by going into her own mind and turning life into the musicals that she loves so much. She needs to save all the money she can get her hands on because she is inflicted with a hereditary disease that is making her go blind, and she has passed on this disease to her adolescent son. If she can save enough money, then he can have an operation on his thirteenth birthday, which will arrest this debilitating condition. Selma works at a factory as a punch-press operator during the day and also fastens pins onto cards as a supplemental income. She sacrifices everything for the dream of saving her son from sharing her fate. The only source of enjoyment for her is to be in a local pay of The Sound of Music. At first the director doesn’t like her because she sings funny and doesn’t appear to be able to dance all that well. However, Selma has a way about her that makes everyone love her, and in short order, he’s among the people who do love her.
Selma and her son live in a small trailer on Bill and Linda’s (David Morse and Cara Seymour) property and they give her a break with rent. Bill supposedly has a large portion of a considerable inheritance left, so they don’t really need Selma’s money. Everything is going as planned for Selma until the day Bill betrays her in a way that is truly horrible. After that, life falls apart and Selma goes into her fantasy world of musicals more and more.
Trier made a movie quite unlike any other that I’ve ever seen. He seems to have a knack for that. This movie is shot with handheld camera’s except when the movie jumps to Selma’s fantasies. When that happens, the color brightens, the cameras are stationary (actually there are a hundred cameras at all different angles to give the viewer every perspective possible), and everybody breaks out into song and dance. Björk choreographed the dance routines and wrote all the songs used in the movie. It’s all very impressive and would mean some good fun, except the story is so terribly sad.
We, the viewers, can easily see that Selma is an angel of epic proportions, but by the end of the film, we are forced to watch the unraveling of her life and see almost everybody point at her, accusing her of things that she could never be capable of doing. I wanted to weep for this poor, lovely, creature, but in the end, just watched her descent into oblivion. Dancer in the Dark is a terribly depressing film, but excellent in spite (or because) of that. Björk shines as an actress and plays her part flawlessly. She has said that this will be the only movie she will ever do. Too bad for us.
Dancer in the Dark is the final installment in Lars Von Trier’s A Heart of Gold trilogy, the first being Breaking the Waves with Emily Watson and the second being The Idiots with Bodil Jørgense. Each movie in the trilogy features a female lead who makes a tremendous sacrifice for the people they love. In this movie, the woman is Selma Jezkova (Björk), an immigrant from Czechoslovakia who, after falling in love with American musicals, makes her way to the state of Washington to live the American dream.
Selma is sweetness personified with an ability to escape the harshness of the world by going into her own mind and turning life into the musicals that she loves so much. She needs to save all the money she can get her hands on because she is inflicted with a hereditary disease that is making her go blind, and she has passed on this disease to her adolescent son. If she can save enough money, then he can have an operation on his thirteenth birthday, which will arrest this debilitating condition. Selma works at a factory as a punch-press operator during the day and also fastens pins onto cards as a supplemental income. She sacrifices everything for the dream of saving her son from sharing her fate. The only source of enjoyment for her is to be in a local pay of The Sound of Music. At first the director doesn’t like her because she sings funny and doesn’t appear to be able to dance all that well. However, Selma has a way about her that makes everyone love her, and in short order, he’s among the people who do love her.
Selma and her son live in a small trailer on Bill and Linda’s (David Morse and Cara Seymour) property and they give her a break with rent. Bill supposedly has a large portion of a considerable inheritance left, so they don’t really need Selma’s money. Everything is going as planned for Selma until the day Bill betrays her in a way that is truly horrible. After that, life falls apart and Selma goes into her fantasy world of musicals more and more.
Trier made a movie quite unlike any other that I’ve ever seen. He seems to have a knack for that. This movie is shot with handheld camera’s except when the movie jumps to Selma’s fantasies. When that happens, the color brightens, the cameras are stationary (actually there are a hundred cameras at all different angles to give the viewer every perspective possible), and everybody breaks out into song and dance. Björk choreographed the dance routines and wrote all the songs used in the movie. It’s all very impressive and would mean some good fun, except the story is so terribly sad.
We, the viewers, can easily see that Selma is an angel of epic proportions, but by the end of the film, we are forced to watch the unraveling of her life and see almost everybody point at her, accusing her of things that she could never be capable of doing. I wanted to weep for this poor, lovely, creature, but in the end, just watched her descent into oblivion. Dancer in the Dark is a terribly depressing film, but excellent in spite (or because) of that. Björk shines as an actress and plays her part flawlessly. She has said that this will be the only movie she will ever do. Too bad for us.