Dancer In The Dark – What An Astounding Performance by Bjork!

I first watched Dancer in the Dark about ten years ago when I was working in Brunei. It is such a powerful movie that it has remained etched in my memory as one of the best movies I have ever watched. Forget about Hollywood. This is a movie in a class of its own.

I have been trying a get a DVD of this movie locally without any success. Slightly over a week ago, I decided to check out Ebay and was able to buy the DVD. After receiving the DVD a couple of days ago, I watched it again and it once again hit me with an enormous, old-fashioned emotional punch. If you cry easily at films, be warned!

Dancer in the Dark is a 2000 Danish musical drama film directed by Lars von Trier and starring Icelandic singer Björk, Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, Cara Seymour, Peter Stormare, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, and Joel Grey. Trier has made three films about female martyrdom — Breaking The Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998), and Dancer In The Dark — which together he calls his “Golden Heart Trilogy”.

Dancer in the Dark is a most unusual film: a melodrama, shot like a documentary with handheld camera, in which characters break out into song and dance as in a musical. It’s not even shot on film, director Lars von Trier opting to use digital video instead, sometimes employing as many as 100 cameras at once to capture a scene.

Dancer in the Dark premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival to standing ovations and controversy and was awarded the Palme d’Or fo0r Best Picture, along with the Best Actress award for Björk. The song “I’ve Seen It All,” with Thom Yorke, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song.

The film was praised for its stylistic innovations. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times stated: “It smashes down the walls of habit that surround so many movies. It returns to the wellsprings. It is a bold, reckless gesture.” Edward Guthmann from the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “It’s great to see a movie so courageous and affecting, so committed to its own differentness.”

The film is set in Washington State in 1964 and focuses on Selma Ježková, a mildly-retarded Czech immigrant who has moved to the United States with her son, Gene Ježek. They live a life of poverty as Selma works at a factory with her good friend Kathy, whom she nicknames Cvalda. She rents a trailer home on the property of local police officer Bill Houston and his wife Linda. She is also pursued by the shy but persistent Jeff who also works at the factory.

What no one in Selma’s life knows is that she has a hereditary degenerative disease which is gradually causing her to go blind. She has been saving up every penny that she makes to pay for an operation which will prevent her twelve year old son Gene from suffering the same fate. Saving up the thousands of dollars for Gene’s operation means working multiple shifts of a stifling job at the local metal-sink-making factory and taking home additional mind-numbing work like hand filling 10,000 display cards with hair-pins for whatever meager extra income she can get. She keeps her savings, in cash, in a candy tin that she hides in the back of a closet in the cramped trailer where she and her son live.

In her day-to-day life, when things are too boring or upsetting, Selma slips into daydreams or perhaps a trance-like state where she imagines the ordinary circumstances and individuals around her have erupted into elaborate musical theater numbers. These songs, as do many of Björk’s songs, use some sort of real-life noise (from factory machines buzzing to the sound of a flag rapping against a flag pole in the wind) as an underlying rhythm. Unfortunately, Selma slips into one such trance while working at the factory. Soon Jeff and Cvalda begin to realize that Selma can barely see at all.

One day, late at night, Bill comes to Selma’s trailer to confess that his materialistic wife, who thinks he is rich from an inheritance, has unknowingly spent all their money. He is behind in payments and the bank is going to take his house, making him fear that his wife will leave him when she finds out he is broke. He asks Selma for a loan, but she declines. To comfort Bill, Selma in turn confesses that, while her own impending blindness is inevitable, she can save Gene’s sight with an operation and is getting close to having the necessary money to pay for it. Bill then hides in the corner of Selma’s home, knowing she can’t see him, and watches as she puts some money in her kitchen tin.

The next day, after having broken her machine the night before through careless error, Selma is fired from her job. When she comes home to put her final wages away she finds the tin is empty; she goes next door to report the theft to Bill and Linda only to hear Linda discussing how Bill has brought home their safe deposit box to count their savings. Linda additionally reveals that Bill has “confessed” his affair with Selma, and that Selma must move out immediately. Knowing that Bill was broke and that the money he is counting must be hers, she confronts him and attempts to take the money back. He draws a gun on her, and in a struggle he is wounded. Linda discovers the two of them and, assuming that Selma is attempting to steal the money, runs off to tell the police at Bill’s command. Bill then begs Selma to take his life, telling her that this will be the only way she will ever reclaim the money that he stole from her. Selma shoots at him several times, but due to her blindness manages to only maim Bill further. In the end, she performs a coup de grâce with the safe deposit box. In one of the scenes, Selma slips into a trance and imagines that Bill’s corpse stands up and slow dances with her, urging her to run to freedom. She does, and takes the money to the Institute for the Blind to pay for her son’s operation before the police can take it from her.

Selma is caught and eventually put on trial. It is here that she is pegged as a Communist sympathizer and murderess. Although she tells as much truth about the situation as she can, she refuses to reveal Bill’s secret, saying that she had promised not to. Additionally, when her claim that the reason she didn’t have any money was because she had been sending it to her father in Czechoslovakia is proven false, she is convicted and given the death penalty.

Cvalda and Jeff eventually put the pieces of the puzzle together and get back Selma’s money, using it instead to pay for a trial lawyer who can free her. Selma becomes furious and refuses the lawyer, opting to face the death penalty rather than let her son go blind, but she is deeply distraught as she awaits her death. Although a sympathetic female prison guard named Brenda tries to comfort her, the other state officials show no feelings and are eager to see her executed.

On her way to the gallows, Selma goes to hug the other men on death row while singing to them. However, on the gallows, she becomes terrified, so that she must be strapped to a collapse board. Her hysteria when the hood is placed over her face delays the execution. Selma begins crying hysterically and Brenda cries with her, but Cvalda rushes to inform her that the operation was successful and that Gene will see.

Relieved, Selma sings the final song on the gallows with no musical accompaniment, although she is hanged before she finishes. A curtain is then drawn in front of her body, while the missing part of the song shows on the screen: “They say it’s the last song/They don’t know us, you see/It’s only the last song/If we let it be.”

I feel the film works very powerfully at an emotional level, tugging hard at your heartstrings. It is a harrowing film of unimaginable depth and emotion. And Björk’s amazingly strong performance demands special accolades. She gives a stunning performance that is so emotionally naked and raw that it is absolutely riveting. Björk poured her soul into this performance and it is truly a performance that will haunt you. To watch her is to witness a revelation of true, unbridled talent.

It is a movie that deserves not only to be seen, but to be cherished. Watching it can be a grueling experience that yanks at your heartstrings. It is not just a good film. It is not just a great film. It is a transcendent film. It provides one of those rare experiences that shake you to your core.

I found this YouTube video of the most heart-wrenching part of the movie……be warned that it will hit you with such a strong emotional punch that you might be left gasping with shock.