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Dancer In The Dark
2000
The final installment in Lars von Trier's Golden Heart trilogy (which includes BREAKING THE WAVES and THE IDIOTS), DANCER IN THE DARK takes the director's original blend of heightened pseudorealism and fabricated melodrama to a dangerously intense level. The story concerns Selma (Bjork), a Czech immigrant living in 1964 .. Read more
| Starring | Bjork, Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, Udo Kier |
|---|---|
| Director | Lars Von Trier |
| Genres | Audio Descriptive, Music/Musical |
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Dancer In The Dark
The final installment in Lars von Trier's Golden Heart trilogy (which includes BREAKING THE WAVES and THE IDIOTS), DANCER IN THE DARK takes the director's original blend of heightened pseudorealism and fabricated melodrama to a dangerously intense level. The story concerns Selma (Bjork), a Czech immigrant living in 1964 Washington State with her 12-year-old son, Gene (Vladan Kostic). On the verge of blindness, Selma spends her days working in a factory, as well as performing other odd jobs, in order to save up enough money to pay for an operation that will cure Gene of the same disease. To pass the time, Selma fantasizes that her own life is a musical, one in which her friends join her in sweeping song-and-dance routines. After her neighbor Bill (David Morse) discovers Selma's hidden savings and steals them from her, she is forced to perform an act of salvation that will condemn her forever. As the innocent Selma, Bjork is one of the most fragile and heartbreaking presences the screen has ever seen. Her unbearably moving performance is enough to keep the viewer mesmerized throughout, even amid the story gaps and inconsistencies. Featuring compassionate supporting turns by Catherine Deneuve and Peter Stormare, DANCER IN THE DARK is an unrelenting gut punch that will have sympathetic audiences quivering with uncontrollable emotion.
| Starring | Bjork, Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, Udo Kier, Peter Stormare, Joel Grey, Jean-Marc Barr |
|---|---|
| Director | Lars Von Trier |
| Studio | 4DVD |
| Run time | DVD: 2 hrs 14 mins |
| Certificate | |
| Genres | Audio Descriptive, Music/Musical |
| Language | DVD: English, English Audio Description |
| Hearing-impaired | English |
| Released | DVD: 15 Jul 2002 Production year: 2000 |
| Format | DVD |
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Critics' reviews (3)
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Lars von Trier is an excellent director of shocking and innovative material (Breaking the Waves, for instance), and here he combines that ability with an old-fashioned musical subplot. You'll either find it riveting or irritating, depending on your feelings about pop singer Björk, who wavers between raw and amateurish as a Czech immigrant in 1960s small-town America. Suffering from an inherited condition of encroaching blindness, she works relentlessly to earn the money for an operation that will save her ten-year-old son from the same fate. But when her landlord (David Morse) divulges his own financial worries, the stage is set for harrowing tragedy. To her credit, the elfin Björk is every inch the victim, but Trier's unremittingly fatalistic narrative doesn't make this easy viewing. It will divide critics and viewers forever.
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A film to divide audiences into those who will respond to the intense emotions on display, many of them heightened by anguished sequences of song and dance, and those who will find the jerky handheld photography a needless distraction, and will reject the
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Most helpful member's review
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16 out of 17 people found this review helpful
Groundbreaking
This is an amazing film. A realist musical: you get the shaky hand-held camerawork, all understatement and naturalist dialogue, then the whole screen bursts into a song and dance routine. What's amazing is that the juxtaposition of those two styles doesn't seem laboured or cynical. At times almost a deconstruction of the Wizard of Oz, it both plays with and subverts the musical genre. Bjork's songs are great, and the ending left the entire cinema sobbing. Yes, it's melodramatic in places and it pulls on the heartstrings occasionally in the most manipulative of ways. And yes, as usual, Von Trier grinds his female leads into the ground. But this is fine, fine stuff.
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Most recent members' review
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11 out of 15 people found this review helpful
If you love Bjork you'll love this
Wow! This film will knock you for six. If you crave originality, depth, plot and great music this film is for you. Not that it's a bundle of laughs, in fact it's downright depressing a lot of time, but the interesting juxtaposition of Bjork's music with the subject matter makes for fascinating viewing. In a nutshell if you love a great operatic tragedy rent it now!!
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News and features
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Antichrist
- Jonathan Crocker
- 20 Jul 2009
The most controversial film of the year? Hard to imagine anything else coming close. Danish bad-boy Lars von Trier emerges briefly from the chronic depression that threatened to end his career and gives himself – and us – an audacious dose of shock therapy. After suffering a family tragedy in the gorgeous, slo-mo opening sequence (lensed in black and white by Slumdog Millionaire’s Oscar-winning Director of Photography Anthony Dod Mantle), a traumatised mother (Charlotte... Read more
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