When the end credits of Dancer in the Dark began to roll at Cannes, I at first thought the applause and cheering for this Scandinavian musical, made in Sweden and Denmark in a form of English, to be ironic. How could anyone have admired or been moved by this tedious, banal, incompetent movie?
When its writer-director (several of whose films I have admired) was later awarded the Palme d’Or and Björk named the festival’s best actress, I was stunned. When I read that the projector broke down or the power failed during the gala screening at Edinburgh, I thought, yes, there is a God up there or an electrician down here, and he’s saying enough is enough.
As with that other Cannes prizewinner L’Humanité, which also left me reeling in disbelief, I gave Lars von Trier’s movie another shot to see if the scales would fall from my eyes. No such luck. The experience begins with five minutes sitting in the dark listening to a portentous sub-Wagnerian overture before grainy images introduce Björk as Selma, a Czech immigrant in Washington State. She is losing her sight, but working overtime to save her son’s. In finding this laughable, I’m reminded of George C Scott’s line as the trainer in Movie Movie who tells the young boxer who’s fighting to pay similar hospital bills:
“Your sister’s eyes are below the belt.”
Selma loves musicals and is rehearsing for an amateur production of The Sound of Music. “I used to dream I was in a musical because in a musical nothing dreadful happens,” she says in an accent more redolent of the Thames estuary than the Danube basin. However, apart from a few bars of My Favourite Things there isn’t a song until the picture’s been running some 40 minutes.
What we have instead are stilted glimpses of Selma with her best friend (Catherine Deneuve), her devoted suitor (Peter Stormare), her policeman landlord (David Morse) and fellow employees at the factory where she runs a press making kitchen sinks.
The handheld camera hosepipes around, uncertain whom to observe, and everyone giggles in the embarrassed manner of a home movie. Björk gives a simpering non-performance; an uncomfortable Deneuve constantly reminds us of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and how a small-scale musical can be drawn from everyday provincial life.
Then comes the first of the movie’s seven songs, sung and danced by Björk and her fellow workers in a frenzied style. The choreography, by the experienced American Vincent Patterson, brings to mind something embarrassingly spontaneous rather than something carefully contrived.
All the songs are prompted by repetitive sounds that Selma hears (not a bad touch) and are fantasies she uses to keep the horrors of everyday life at bay, but the lyrics make the words of their fellow Nordic bards Abba sound like Cole Porter at his witties.