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. 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.

Dancer in the Dark is the third film in Lars von Trier's "Golden Heart Trilogy;" the previous two films were Breaking the Waves (1996) and The Idiots (1998). The film was an international co-production between companies based in several countries: Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, United States, United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Norway. 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 and was 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 Song.

Plot[link]

The film is set in Washington state in 1964 and focuses on Selma Ježková (Björk), a Czech immigrant who has moved to the United States with her son, Gene Ježek (Kostic). They live a life of poverty as Selma works at a factory with her good friend Kathy, whom she nicknames Cvalda (Catherine Deneuve). She rents a trailer home on the property of town policeman Bill Houston (David Morse) and his wife Linda (Cara Seymour). She is also pursued by the shy but persistent Jeff (Peter Stormare) 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 (in a candy tin in her kitchen) to pay for an operation which will prevent her young son from suffering the same fate. To escape the misery of her daily life Selma accompanies Cvalda to the local cinema where together they watch fabulous Hollywood musicals (or more accurately, Selma listens as Cvalda describes them to her, to the annoyance of the other theater patrons, or acts out the dance steps upon Selma's hand using her fingers). 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. Additionally, Bill reveals to Selma that his materialistic wife Linda spends more than his salary, there is no money left from his inheritance, and he is behind in payments and the bank is going to take his house. He asks Selma for a loan, but she declines. He regrets telling Selma his secret. To comfort Bill, Selma reveals her secret blindness, 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. 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 (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) tries to comfort her, the other state officials show no feelings and are eager to see her executed. Brenda encourages Selma to walk. 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 of the movie 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."

Cast[link]

• Björk as Selma Ježková
• Catherine Deneuve as Kathy (Cvalda)
• David Morse as Bill Houston
• Cara Seymour as Linda Houston
• Peter Stormare as Jeff
• Joel Grey as Oldrich Novy
• Vladica Kostic as Gene Jezek
• Jean-Marc Barr as Norman
• Vincent Paterson as Samuel
• Siobhan Fallon as Brenda
• Željko Ivanek as District attorney
• Udo Kier as Dr. Porkorny
• Jens Albinus as Morty
• Reathel Bean as Judge
• Michael Flessas as Angry Man
• Mette Berggreen as Receptionist
• Lars Michael Dinesen as Defense attorney
• Katrine Falkenberg as Suzan
• Stellan Skarsgård as the Doctor

More characters appeared in this film. They were uncredited.

Style[link]

Much of the film has a similar look to Lars 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[link]

The Great Northern TMY locomotive

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 appear in any film ever again.^[4][5] (although in 2005, she appeared in Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9). She had disagreements with the director over the content of the film, wanting the ending to be more uplifting.^{[citation needed]} She later called Trier sexist.^[6] Deneuve and others have described her performance as feeling rather than acting.^[7] 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.^[8]

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, Faroese, and Swedish, "Björk" means "birch."

A Danish TMY class locomotive (owned by Swedish train operator TÅGAB, a shortline) was painted in the American Great Northern scheme for the movie, and not repainted afterward.^[9] A T43 class locomotive was repainted too, though never used in the movie.

Critical response[link]

Reaction to Dancer in the Dark was mixed. For example, on The Movie Show, the most influential movie review show in Australia, Margaret Pomeranz gave it 5 stars while David Stratton gave it 0, the only time this has happened. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian said it was "one of the worst films, one of the worst artworks and perhaps one of the worst things in the history of the world."^[10] The response is reflected in the film's official website, which posts both positive and negative reviews on its main page.^[11] The diverse reviews result in an overall "Fresh" rating; 68 % grade on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.^[12]

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."^[13] and 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."^[14]

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."^[15]

Accolades[link]

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.^[16] The song "I've Seen It All" was nominated for an Oscar for best song, at the performance of which Björk wore her famous swan dress.

Won

• Award of the Japanese Academy - Best Foreign Film
• Bodil Award - Best Actress (Björk)
• Cannes Film Festival - Best Actress (Björk)^[16]
• Cannes Film Festival - Golden Palm Award (Lars von Trier)^[16]
• Edda Awards (Iceland) - Best Actress (Björk)
• European Film Awards - Best Actress (Björk)
• European Film Awards - Best Film
• Golden Satellite Awards - Best Original Song (I've Seen It All)
• Goya Awards - Best European Film (Lars von Trier)
• Independent Spirit Awards - Best Foreign Film (Lars von Trier)

Nominated

• Academy Award - Best Original Song (I've Seen It All)
• Bodil Award - Best Film
• BRIT Awards - Best Soundtrack
• Camerimage Awards - Gold Frog Award
• Chicago Film Critics Association Awards - Best Actress (Björk)
• Chicago Film Critics Association Awards - Best Original Score
• Cinema Writers Circle Awards (Spain) - Best Foreign Film
• César Awards (France) - Best Foreign Film
• Golden Globe Awards - Best Actress in a Film - Drama (Björk)
• Golden Globe Awards - Best Original Song (I've Seen It All)
• Golden Satellite Awards - Best Drama
• Golden Satellite Awards - Best Actress, Drama (Björk)
• Golden Satellite Awards - Best Supporting Actress, Drama (Catherine Denevue)

Music[link]

• Original music: Björk
• Singers: Björk, Catherine Deneuve, Siobhan Fallon, David Morse, Cara Seymour, Vladica Kostic, Peter Stormare (In the soundtrack Selmasongs, Thom Yorke sings instead of Stormare)
• Lyrics: Björk, Lars von Trier and Sjón
• Non-original music: Richard Rodgers
• Choreographer: Vincent Paterson

References in other media[link]

• The Finnish band The Rasmus included a song called "Dancer in the Dark" in the special edition of their 2005 album Hide from the Sun. The song is about the film.
• Drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts arranged and recorded a version of "107 Steps" on his live album Detained: Live at the Blue Note.

Further reading[link]

• Georg Tiefenbach: Drama und Regie (Writing and Directing): Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2010. ISBN 978-3-8260-4096-2.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Dancer in the Dark at the Internet Movie Database
• Dancer in the Dark at AllRovi
• Dancer in the Dark at Box Office Mojo
• Dancer in the Dark at Rotten Tomatoes
• Review by Sian Kirwan - BBC
• Review at The Film Experience
• Review by A. O. Scott - The New York Times