The Dancer in the Dark got the limelight

This movie will definitely leave you fumbling in the dark with its estrangement from the typical capitalist movies. It took me almost a year of occasionally watching it, and doing some research before I was fully enlightened with Lars Von Trier's idiosyncratic style. Taking into consideration his film-maker's manifesto, the Dogma 95, which has been the staple in most of his films. Together with two other movies namely: Breaking Waves (1996), and The Idiots (1998), Dancer in the Dark (2000) is included in Von Trier's 'Golden Heart Trilogy', although this particular film is not under the command of his self-imposed doctrine. The film utilized a hand-held camera to capture the scenes in its rawest sense possible, unaltered and unrefined. The common movie-goer would most likely be fluctuant to how they would receive this opus, which is almost impossibly plausible.

This Danish musical—yes, musical— is about a Czech immigrant during the 1964 in the U.S. State of Washington named Selma Ježková, played by Björk the enigmatic Icelandic songstress. She plays a single mother, who has been struggling from a frugal lifestyle and her deteriorating eyesight. She and her son lives in a trailer owned by a police officer named Bill Houston (David Morse), who lives with his wife named Linda (Cara Seymour). The compassionate and childless couple watches over her son as she goes to work. She operates a punch-press machine to create basins out of metal sheets as a means of living. After she toils hard from all the factory work, she still manages to steal time to do an extra job fastening pins in a cardboard, and to practice singing for a local production of Broadway in their neighborhood. Her friend Cathy (Catherine Deneuve), whom she affectionately monikers as Cvalda is stubborn towards her enthusiasm in musicals, but then tolerates her after seeing that Selma's passion in singing and dancing gives hue to her gloomy existence. Her life's struggles revolved around raising up her difficult son Gene (Vladica Kostic), dealing with her persistent suitor Jeff (Peter Stormare) and her lapsing moments from reality whenever she pays attention to the natural sounds in her surroundings. Her far-fetched tendencies result from her bright-eyed disposition, and her gradually obscuring vision leaving her helplessly daydreaming about people suddenly bursting into song and dance like into a somewhat exuberant musical frenzy. This mostly gets her in trouble but most of the time, she seems blind to the real world. She later becomes victim to a shady plot (blocked spoiler) that complicates her situation, and eventually her condition. As things get bizarre, she still finds an opportunity to sing in her heart, the music clinging into her senses like a flicker of light into her darkest hour.

This movie is intentionally drab, it's as if Von Trier shot it for our ears. The unembellished cinematography in this film determines those who are blindly watching because the enlightened viewers would fairly see that this film is objective in a sense that it wants to open our eyes to the truth of how we see things naturally. It's the same for Björk, whose outlandish appearance in most of her music videos disturbs the consciousness of those who see them. She however, does not do this for sensationalism. She has been known for her evocative music, which could spark some kind of a feeling deep under the dark recesses of the soul. Any reputation she gained by those videos is adjunct to her renowned ability to sing by feeling. In this motion picture, she is Selma. She and Selma are two different persona. The only junction where they meet is through music. Von Trier made it so that music was the focal element of this film, otherwise Björk wouldn't have made an exception to accept the role of the lead character; and effectively act upon it. What was brilliant about this film was that it was executed perfectly that you wouldn't stagger with the grind of the low-end camera because the scenes were emotionally charged, and at the same time you wouldn't sense the melodramatic pulse because the scenes were unmitigated. In other words, it is one the most gut-wrenching films I've ever seen.

Given that this film had won the most prestigious award from the Cannes festival, the Palm d'Or does not brighten the chances that everybody would see the light in Von Trier's dark scheme. Hence I would, as any other film critic would do, render it in black and white. All you need to do is open your eyes and know the difference between looking and seeing.