Flak Magazine: Review of Dancer in the Dark, 10-15-00

Scandinavian weirdo and Dogme '95 co-founder Lars von Trier set out to make a musical like no other, enlisting pop sensation and fellow Scandinavian eccentric Björk to star and set his lyrics to music. It's too bad the two swears they'll never work together again, because Dancer in the Dark, the result of this unlikely pairing, is one of the saddest, most deeply felt and most beautiful musicals ever made.

Björk stars as Selma, a Czech immigrant in Washington state who is slowly going blind. Saving all the money she makes at her factory job for an expensive operation to save her son from the hereditary disorder she has, Selma's only refuge is in the great American movie musicals that her friend Kathy (Catherine Deneuve, the most beautiful factory worker who ever was) describes to her in the theater.

In order to escape the doldrums of her life, Selma often imagines her life as one of those musicals, using the sounds of the factory or rhythm of the nearby train as the basis of her daydreams. The more Selma's sight diminishes, the more she slips into her musical fantasies.

And oh, what fantasies they are. Von Trier — the bastard child of Ingmar Bergman, Carl Dreyer and MTV — shot the whole film digitally, but he switches from the hand-held cameras he uses for Selma's real life to over 100 stationary cameras for the musical scenes, infusing them with the dream-like quality they must hold for Selma.

Selma's daydreaming forces her to withdraw from society even further, cutting her off from those who love her: Kathy, her son Gene (Vladin Kostic), her cop neighbor Bill (David Morse) and Jeff (Peter Stormare), her sort-of love interest. Her defense mechanism soon becomes tunnel vision, focused only on the money she's saved for her son's operation.

It's Selma's innate goodness — this selfless devotion to saving Gene's eyesight — that becomes her downfall. von Trier requires a certain suspension in belief to accept the escalating tragedy that unfolds in such a pure life, but it's to his credit that he makes it work.

Much like Breaking the Waves, von Trier's other wrenching naïf tragedy, he tugs at viewers' heartstrings while asking them not to condemn the heroine's actions, no matter how misguided they might seem.

In the end, that's what Dancer in the Dark is all about: How much should a person be willing to sacrifice? In the movie's most memorable musical sequence, Selma sings "I've seen it all" to Jeff, answering that question with a candor and sense of duty that few of us in the real world could muster.

— Stephanie Kuenn (smkuenn at gmail dot com)