Refreshing Darkness

film review by Emma Wunsch

Dancer in the Dark
Lars von Trier and DOGME 95

Bjork (above) and Deneuve are refreshingly unglamorous as immigrant Washingtonian proles in Dancer in the Dark.

It seems appropriate that as I write this, the long, gray rainy season has once again born down on Seattle culminating with the painfully drawn-out election. Sometimes life gives you the rough, unedited cut.

Thank goodness.

Because without the real, raw and the sometimes intensely ugly, there would be no Lars Von Trier. Currently playing and a definite-do-not-miss is von Trier's latest "Dancer in the Dark." Both reviled and hailed, I believe "Dancer in the Dark" points to von Trier's brilliance as a director to make a film that has received the gamut of responses. "Dancer in the Dark" stars Scandinavian Pop-Indie-Icon Bjork and like many of von Trier's films, is not an easy film to watch. At the very least it is intensely tragic, often gut-wrenching and heartbreaking. But under von Trier's direction it is always beautiful; with Bjork as the lead (which won her a Best Actress prize in Cannes) it is amazingly genuine.

"Dancer in the Dark" is the story of Selma (Bjork), a woman on the verge of genetic blindness working in a factory set in Washington State, 1964. Selma, a Czechoslovakian immigrant, is trying to save money so her son, who will eventually suffer the same fate as his mother, can have an eye operation. Life for Selma, like for many of us, proves unjust and unfair and eventually ends with all her money getting stolen, a murder, a trial and prison sentence. But even in her impending darkness, Selma sees beauty everywhere. Von Trier used two different levels of colors in the film in order to represent that even in the most dreary Selma, with her passions for musicals, finds happiness in the mundane. One touching scene is when Kathy, Selma's best friend (Catherine Deneuve) "shows" nearly blind Selma the dance steps taking in a musical by having her fingers dance on Selma's palms. Because von Trier uses hand held cameras and does not attempt to hide from the reality of life, the factory scenes in "Dancer" are some of the strongest because amazingly both Bjork and Deneuve seem like they've spent their entire lives working in factories rather than as film/pop stars. Spacey Selma daydreams her factory shifts into rousing, vibrant colorful song and dance numbers while after work she is cast as Maria in a community production of the Sound of Music. Bjork is perfectly cast as Selma; on one hand she plays the dreamy, childlike, naive, good-girl, Selma to a tee, while simultaneously expressing fabulous fantasies and disturbing rage. Bjork doesn't act as Selma, she becomes her. Bjork as Selma makes it virtually impossible for viewers to simply glide through Dancer; rather the views, transformed by Bjork's genuity become Selma too. In an indieWire interview, von Trier described Bjork as someone who " ...she fascinated me and I still am [fascinated], but the problem was that she was so goddamn talented. That's the only way I can put it. She has this little girl kind of way that she is, but she is extremely clever, I must say. I've never worked with anyone like her. And that is, of course, the good side of it. The bad side of it is all this gave her this big pain. From feeling the whole thing."

Because it is so inescapable to note that Bjork feels the whole thing, the viewer does also, and thus we too descend down Selma's surreal, tragic, bizarre musical world.

Five years ago when von Trier and a collective of filmmakers founded DOGME 95 in Copenhagen he became a part of a new filmmaking revolution. Through their "vow of chastity", DOGME 95 participants have the sole purpose of countering "certain tendencies" of today's cinema. DOGME 95 resists film illusion and cosmetic trickery. While technology has allowed anyone the ability to make a film, "to DOGME 95 the movie is not illusion! Today a technological storm is raging of which the result is the elevation of cosmetics to God. By using a new technology anyone at any time can wash the last grains of truth away in the deadly embrace of sensation. The illusions are everything the movie can hide behind."

Currently there are fifteen DOGME 95 films; they have a great website with a good deal of information regarding getting involved with making your own DOGME 95 film. In an interview with Peter Ovig Knudsen, Von Trier described DOGME 95 as an attempt to give fresh air, to regain lost innocence [in the cinema]. Von Trier does this with The Idiots (1998) his first contribution to DOGME 95. Unfortunately the American version was cut and edited, but is still worth viewing. The Idiots is about a group of young intellectuals in Denmark who move into a relative's abandoned house in the country and pass the days "spassing" or acting like idiots. The Idiots is a challenging, political and yet simple film, since it adheres to the DOGME 95 vows of chastity. On a political level it confronts attitudes towards the mentally handicapped, but simultaneously embraces weirdness and difference. Von Trier said in the same interview, "The Idiots is a more complex, far weirder film [than Breaking the Waves, 1996], a film you ought to be amused and moved by, but also a bit disturbed by. The film contains a dangerousness because it juggles the concept of normalcy with the way we ought to and ought not to behave. And if one devalues rationality, the world tends to fall apart."

While it may be rainy outside, the brilliance of Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark and The Idiots is that they challenge viewers to see the beauty within our often rainy, gray, disturbing realities.