Dancer in the Dark


Dancer in the Dark is a 2000 English-language Danish musical melodrama film written and directed by Lars von Trier. It stars Icelandic musician Björk as a daydreaming immigrant factory worker who suffers from a degenerative eye condition and is saving up to pay for an operation to prevent her young son from suffering the same fate. Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, Peter Stormare, Cara Seymour and Joel Grey also star.
The soundtrack for the film, released as the album Selmasongs, was written mainly by Björk, but a number of songs featured contributions from Mark Bell and the lyrics were by von Trier and Sjón. Three songs from Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music were also used in the film.
This is the third film in von Trier's "Golden Heart Trilogy"; the other two films are Breaking the Waves and The Idiots. The film was an international co-production among companies based in thirteen countries and regions: Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. It was shot with a handheld camera, and was somewhat inspired by a Dogme 95 look.
Dancer in the Dark premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival to standing ovations and controversy, but was nonetheless awarded the Palme d'Or, 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 Original Song but lost to "Things Have Changed" by Bob Dylan from Wonder Boys. The film polarized critics, with some deriding it as melodramatic and others lauding it as highly moving and innovative. The film later appeared on multiple lists of the best films of the 2000s.

Plot

In Washington state in 1964, Selma Ježková, a Czech immigrant, 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 town policeman Bill Houston and his wife, Linda. She is also pursued by the shy but persistent Jeff, who also works at the factory.
Selma has a degenerative eye condition and is losing her vision. She has been saving up to pay for an operation which will prevent her young son from losing his vision. She also takes part in rehearsals for a production of The Sound of Music and accompanies Kathy to the local cinema, where together they watch fabulous Hollywood musicals, as Cvalda describes them to her.
In her day-to-day life, Selma slips into daydreams. Soon Jeff and Cvalda begin to realize that Selma can barely see at all. Additionally, Bill reveals to Selma that his materialistic wife spends more than his salary, and the bank is going to take his house. To comfort Bill, Selma reveals her eye condition, hoping that together they can keep each other's secret. 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. 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 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 out of blindness manages to only maim Bill further. In the end, she performs a coup de grâce with the safe deposit box. 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 murderer. 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 did not 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 are eager to see her executed. Brenda encourages Selma to walk. 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.

Cast

Much of the film has a similar look to von Trier's earlier Dogme 95-influenced films: it is filmed on low-end, hand-held digital cameras to create a documentary-style appearance. It is not a true Dogme 95 film, however, because the Dogme rules stipulate that violence, non-diegetic music, and period pieces are not permitted. Trier differentiates the musical sequences from the rest of the film by using static cameras and by brightening the colours.

Production

The film's title suggests the Fred Astaire/Cyd Charisse duet "Dancing in the Dark" from the 1953 film The Band Wagon, which ties in with the film's musical theatre theme.
Actress Björk, who is known primarily as a contemporary composer, had rarely acted before, and has described the process of making this film as so emotionally taxing that she would not act in any film ever again. Deneuve and others have described her performance as feeling rather than acting. Björk has said that it is a misunderstanding that she was put off acting by this film; rather, she never wanted to act but made an exception for Lars von Trier.
The musical sequences were filmed simultaneously with over 100 digital cameras so that multiple angles of the performance could be captured and cut together later, thus shortening the filming schedule.
Björk lies down on a stack of birch logs during the "Scatterheart" sequence. In Icelandic and Swedish, "björk" means "birch".
A Danish MY class locomotive was painted in the American Great Northern scheme for the movie, and not repainted afterward. A T43 class locomotive was repainted too, though never used in the film.

Music

In October 2017, Björk posted on her Facebook page that she had been sexually harassed by a "Danish film director she worked with". She commented:
The Los Angeles Times found evidence identifying him as Lars von Trier. Von Trier has rejected Björk's allegation that he sexually harassed her during the making of the film Dancer in the Dark, and said "That was not the case. But that we were definitely not friends, that’s a fact," to Danish daily Jyllands-Posten in its online edition. Peter Aalbaek Jensen, the producer of Dancer in the Dark, told Jyllands-Posten that "As far as I remember we were the victims. That woman was stronger than both Lars von Trier and me and our company put together. She dictated everything and was about to close a movie of 100m kroner ."
After von Trier's statement, Björk explained the details about this incident, saying:
Björk's manager, Derek Birkett, has also accused von Trier's actions in the past, stating:

Reception

Critical response

Reaction to Dancer in the Dark was polarized. For example, on The Movie Show, Margaret Pomeranz gave it five stars while David Stratton gave it a zero, a score shared only by Geoffrey Wright's Romper Stomper. Stratton later described it as his "favourite horror film". Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian dubbed Dancer in the Dark the “most shallow and crudely manipulative” film of 2000, and later slammed it as "one of the worst films, one of the worst artworks and perhaps one of the worst things in the history of the world." The response is reflected in the film's official website, which posts both positive and negative reviews on its main page. The diverse reviews result in an overall 69% "Fresh" rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 6.73/10, based on 118 reviews. The website's critical consensus reads, "Dancer in Dark can be grim, dull, and difficult to watch, but even so, it has a powerful and moving performance from Björk and is something quite new and visionary." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 61 out of 100, based on 33 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
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." However, criticism was directed at its storyline. Jonathan Foreman of the New York Post described the film as "meretricious fakery" and called it "so unrelenting in its manipulative sentimentality that, if it had been made by an American and shot in a more conventional manner, it would be seen as a bad joke."
In 2016, David Ehrlich ranked Dancer in the Dark as one of the best films of the 21st century, hailing Björk's performance as the "single greatest feat of film acting" since 2000. Björk's performance is also ranked in the "25 Best Performances Not Nominated for an Oscar of the 21st Century" list.

Accolades

Dancer in the Dark premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival and was awarded the Palme d'Or, along with the Best Actress award for Björk. The song "I've Seen It All" was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song, at the performance of which Björk wore her famous swan dress.
Sight & Sound magazine conducts a poll every ten years of the world's finest film directors to find out the Ten Greatest Films of All Time. This poll has been going since 1952, and has become the most recognised poll of its kind in the world. In 2012, Cyrus Frisch was one of the four directors who voted for Dancer in the Dark. Frisch commented: "A superbly imaginative film that leaves conformity in shambles." Director Oliver Schmitz also lauded the work as "relentless, claustrophobic, the best movie about capital punishment as far as I’m concerned".
AwardDate of ceremonyCategoryRecipientResult
Academy Awards25 March 2001Best Original Song"I've Seen It All", by Björk, Lars von Trier, and Sjón Sigurdsson
Bodil Awards2001Bodil Award for Best Danish FilmLars von Trier
Bodil Awards2001Best ActressBjörk
Cannes Film FestivalMay 2000Palme d'OrLars von Trier
Cannes Film FestivalMay 2000Best ActressBjörk
César Awards24 February 2001Best Foreign FilmLars von Trier
European Film Awards2 December 2000Best FilmLars von Trier
European Film Awards2 December 2000Best ActressBjörk
European Film Awards2 December 2000Best Director – People's ChoiceLars von Trier
European Film Awards2 December 2000Best Actress – People's ChoiceBjörk
Independent Spirit AwardsMarch 2001Best Foreign FilmLars von Trier
Golden Globes21 January 2001Best Actress in a Motion Picture – DramaBjörk
Golden Globes21 January 2001Best Original Song"I've Seen It All", by Björk, Lars von Trier, and Sjón Sigurdsson
Goya Awards2001Best European FilmLars von Trier