nixsight

Girl One is trying to kill me with movies. Last week, she wanted to watch “Requiem For A Dream” on movie night – which is what I’m calling what happens when Wednesday-ish comes around and I haven’t watched a movie to review yet – and this week she suggested “Dancer In The Dark”.

It’s a tough movie. All around, 360 degree tough. The subject matter is tragic and hard to watch, the c0nceptual approach of the film is abstract and difficult to pin down, and the script and acting don’t make a lot of concessions to accessibility for the audience, with rapid and sometimes unpronounced transitions between strict naturalism and wild expressionism.

Depending on how you look at it, it’s either a harsh critique of the Hollywood musical, or it’s a rapt and adoring love-letter to it. Or it’s an exploration of hypocrisy and betrayal, or a look at how far twisted in on itself loyalty and devotion can become.

I’ll tell you what it absolutely isn’t. It absolutely isn’t a Bruce Springsteen biopic.

I can see it also having had a massively reduced potential audience. If you don’t like musicals, you’re probably going to struggle with this, but if you do like musicals, you’re almost as likely to loathe it as not, because Lars Von Trier and Bjork’s respective voices make for very idiosyncratic and peculiar musical sequences. If you were one of those people – and there are a lot of you – who really can’t stand Bjork’s voice or persona, this probably isn’t going to be the artistic object that changes your mind, but if you love Bjork’s music, there is no guarantee that this film is going to capture your imagination – when much of her output is technology based and modern, Von Trier’s period piece is very low-key, with moments of documentary style shooting and washed-out grime and graft.

And fuck, is it depressing.

But ultimately, this story of a Czech woman transplanted to the US – who is going blind, will do anything to help her son avoid a similar fate, and who copes with the hardness of her life through her basic sweetness and simple ideals, and her rich and vibrant fantasy life – is a brave and ambitious experiment on the part of everyone involved, that works thematically more often than it doesn’t, and gives you enough aesthetically rich stuff to listen to or watch as it goes along.

There is a problem early on in the film, where Von Trier ambles into the movie by way of a sequence of hand-held shot scenes that drop the viewer in midway through what could easily be bits of behind the scenes footage. For me, there was a conflict going on here – the film needed to convince me early on that Bjork was going to be able to pull off acting as well as singing in this movie, and unfortunately these few scenes are done in a way – or feature activity – that can easily be interpreted as someone having pointed a camera at a bunch of actors and Bjork, and her just acting like Bjork – albeit in costume.

Either Von Trier didn’t consider this, or did and decided that it would be unfair to the movie and his star to shoot things any differently than he would normally have. Or maybe even decided that this would be an interesting game to play with the audience’s expectations.

But unfortunately for me, I’m an overthinker, and the end result was that it took me a lot longer to identify Selma as a character in her own right, because I was too preoccupied with the idea that the director might be building a film around the singer and using his and the other actors’ talent to prop her up. Thinking about it now – I mean, literally now as I type – this is entirely my problem, and I don’t know how Von Trier could have done it better. Actually, it’s probably a perfect way to start this movie.

Beautiful, understated performances from Stormare, Deneuve and Morse give Bjork’s performance better context, and actually I started to really enjoy her acting before long. A warm if short supporting role by Jean-Marc Barr stood out, too.

To be honest, this isn’t a very clear review – I think I need to sit with this movie for a little while longer before I can really put together any coherent thoughts about it. But I suppose that in itself gives you a reasonable enough sense of how it affected me. Not sure if I love it, but it’s a bone-deep kind of film, and that in itself has it’s merits.