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Dancer in the Dark

Lars von Trier attempts to make a modern day musical and, against all the odds, he succeeds. This is due, in no small part, to the charismatic presence of the Icelandic songstress Bjork, who plays Selma, an immigrant single mother who likes nothing better than to daydream about musicals and making songs from the sounds all around her.

For the love of her son, she works day and night in a factory assembling packets of needles because she wants to give her son an operation to save him from the hereditary condition that is slowly making her blind. Mother and son live together in a trailer in the garden of Bill, the local police officer, played with fantastic panache by David Morse. He is a fine upstanding member of the community, who halfway through the film carries out an evil deed and, from that point, events unfold on an inevitable path to tragedy. At the end, I doubt there was a dry eye in the cinema. The driving narrative holds everything together well and there is a whole range of delicately-weighted support performances including Catherine Deneuve as Kathy, Selma's only true friend.

Although I would argue the end is about 20 minutes late in coming, the film still works, as a whole. The musical numbers can jar a little, but they're an interesting experiment. It's encouraging to see an inventive writer/director like Lars von Trier continuing to innovate as his career moves forward.

Written by: mujinga

Reviewers Rating: 8
Reader's Rating: 8.73
Reader's Votes: 15

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