Luminous Bjork shines through `Dark's' bleakness

Movie review

XXX "Dancer in the Dark," with Bjork, Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, Peter Stormare, Joel Grey. Written and directed by Lars von Trier. 138 minutes. Harvard Exit, Seven Gables. Rated "R" for violence, adult themes.

It's Jeff (Peter Stormare), the well-meaning admirer of Selma (the Icelandic singer Bjork), who annunciates the must-be-asked question in Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier's musical, "Dancer in the Dark."

"I don't get musicals," he says. "Why do they start to sing and dance all of a sudden?"

For most of movie history the answer was love and joy and more love. In the past few decades, certainly with Dennis Potter's "Pennies from Heaven," the answer became despair. Song and dance in musicals - like the movies themselves - became a means to escape a dreadful and wearying reality.

It's this latter mantle that von Trier has picked up.

Selma, a Czech immigrant, lives in Washington state in 1964. Bad enough, right? She's also a single mother, renting a trailer from next-door neighbors Bill (David Morse) and Linda (Cara Seymour), and she works a dead-end factory job at the J. Anderson Tool Co. In her spare time she cards hairpins to supplement her income. Oh, and she's going blind.

Yet, as played by Bjork (who won the Best Actress award at this year's Cannes Film Festival), she is the furthest thing from depressed. She moves through the film with a kooky, beatific smile, waves at trains, and seems to enjoy - with a touching, saintly awareness - every moment of her life. At work she is watched over by her friend, Kathy (a mother-hennish Catherine Deneuve), and after work Jeff stands outside the factory with his pickup waiting to give her a ride home, which she always declines, preferring, like a good Pac-Northwesterner, her bicycle.

She's also a lover of musicals, and has recently won the part of Maria in an amateur production of "The Sound of Music." Sometimes the rhythms of the factory coalesce into a beat, which blossoms in her mind into a musical number starring herself and her friends. Perhaps this is the reason for her perpetual, kooky smile.

One evening, Bill, her neighbor and landlord, confesses that his much-ballyhooed inheritance has been depleted, and that his wife is spending more than his policeman's salary will allow; he fears she will leave him when she discovers the truth. Selma confesses back that she's going blind - and that this is a genetic condition that will affect her son, Gene. These mutual confessions, watched over by Linda from the "big house," start a chain of events that end in tragedy.

"Dancer in the Dark" won the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes, and, like a lot of von Trier's work ("Breaking the Waves," "The Idiots"), divided viewers and critics alike. There seems no middle ground for von Trier and his Dogma 95 films, which attempt to restore naturalism to film. You either love or hate him.

Here's my middle ground. Most of "Dancer in the Dark" is filmed with a hand-held camera, documentary-style, which, at times, made me literally, physically nauseated (I was grateful when the musical numbers appeared, and the camera stopped jumping around). Many early scenes came off like bad improv, and there were parts when the film just dragged.

The musical numbers never wowed, although they could be poignant, as when Selma, almost completely blind, sings "I have seen it all." "Cabaret's" Joel Grey also added some zing near the end.

Nevertheless, "Dark" has moments of unbelievable power and horror - particularly in a climactic middle scene between Bjork and Morse - and these moments make the rest worthwhile.

One wonders, in fact, if you don't need the relative boredom of the early scenes, which make "Dark" seem a plotless, slice-of-life film, to lull you before the plot kicks in and drags you with it.

Perversely, I also enjoyed von Trier's take on and criticism of certain dense, brutal aspects of American life during the Cold War. It stank, at times, of stereotypes (a bullet-headed, commie-hating district attorney), but was truthful in this regard: This is how part of the rest of the world sees us.