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Stunning, compelling, and well, strange'Dancer in the Dark' deserves an audience
(CNN) -- Lars von Trier's revisionist musical, "Dancer in the Dark," is a perplexing film that contains moments of astonishing power. Von Trier -- who loves to polarize audiences -- simply doesn't know when to quit. His establishing scenes fill up a third of the lengthy running time, and every now and then he seems to stop cold and begin a completely different movie. Though "Dancer in the Dark" won the Palm d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, von Trier's achievement is too long-winded and wavering to be completely satisfying. The real reason to see this movie is a remarkable debut performance by the strangely childlike Icelandic pop star Bjork. Bjork, who was also honored at Cannes, so fully deserves an Academy Award that they should mail it to her right now and skip the nominations. Unfortunately, von Trier's sometimes off-putting mis en scene may scuttle her chances. Bjork inhabits a scene the same way she delivers a song -- as if her very life depends upon it. Her screen work, like her music, alternately whispers and shrieks, but you can't take your eyes off of her. Contrived plot? AbsolutelyShe plays a timid factory worker named Selma Jezkova, a Czech immigrant living with her troubled 10-year-old son in the rural United States. Selma is a sweet, naive young woman who harbors a dreadful secret. She's slowly going blind, and urgently needs to earn enough money to pay for a mysterious operation that will save her little boy from the same fate. That sounds contrived because it is contrived. It's the kind of plot device you might find in an 80-year-old silent movie. Von Trier often displays a bizarre disregard for reality, even though his unrefined musical numbers are supposed to represent Selma's escape from the real world. Like the doomed sheet-music salesman in Dennis Potter's "Pennies From Heaven" (1981), Selma is a fan of splashy movie musicals; she even struggles through rehearsals for a community theater production of "The Sound of Music." But her nutty imagination is a far more effective form of release. She tries to sidestep tragedy by falling into musical daydreams, but those reveries, as staged by Vincent Patterson, owe very little to the Hollywood choreography that inspires her. Von Trier shot "Dancer in the Dark" on digital video, with 100 miniature cameras recording the musical numbers. He consistently avoids tracking shots of any sort, and the songs, almost all of which he co-wrote with Bjork, are dynamic mixes full of electronic beats and lush orchestral backing. Fred Astaire wouldn't dig it. Odd scenes, dreamsThe resulting sequences look like a raggedy cross between the proletarian geometry of "Metropolis" (1927) and a cinema verite documentary. These scenes often work in spite of their peculiarity, due to Bjork's innate ability to lock into an emotion and drive it straight through your forehead. But one or two numbers are oddball marvels. The best one takes place onboard a slowly moving flatbed train, with Selma and a crew of lumberjacks stomping their way through an especially romantic outburst. There's really no precedent for this kind of thing, even in music videos. Von Trier certainly has guts. The musical interludes are a testament to his ramshackle talent. Too bad he can't maintain that degree of purpose for an entire picture. If his previous films prove anything, it's that he simply can't resist drawing attention to himself. You get the uneasy feeling that he's just as happy to aggravate people as he is to touch them. "Dancer in the Dark" morphs from a working-woman's lament to a groundbreaking musical to a hellish nightmare involving a murder...or was it a mercy killing? Again, you never know when Bjork will suddenly do something that brings you to tears or makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Romancing, tap dancingOnly a spoilsport would disclose her most dramatic moments. Her final scene is absolutely harrowing; its emotional imprint will stay with you for days. Things grow tedious for lengthy stretches of time, though, and von Trier seems to like it that way. He takes forever with the details of Selma's day-to-day existence. Catherine Deneuve, of all people, plays her best friend at the factory. One would imagine she's there only because she appeared in Jacques Demy's equally eccentric musical "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" (1964). In fact, half the people Selma works with seem like Europeans who fell out of a plane and landed in a U.S. assembly line. Peter Stormare (the hulking psychotic from 1996's "Fargo") plays a would-be suitor, and the gifted Swedish actor, Stellan Skarsgard, makes a cameo appearance as a factory physician. By the time Joel Grey shows up to tap dance during a courtroom scene, you'd swear that von Trier has lost his mind. The only supporting performers who seem in their element are David Morse, as a police officer who rents a trailer out to Selma, and Siobhan Fallon as a sympathetic prison guard. Both actors share stunning scenes with Bjork that are best left for your discovery. This movie, for all its flaws, is a unique journey, and needs to be experienced rather than explained. Hang on tight, open your mind, and give it a shot. There's violence and bloodshed in "Dancer in the Dark," but Bjork's towering performance overwhelms everything in its path. Rated R. 140 minutes, making it roughly 30 minutes too long. "Dancer in the Dark," opens September 22 in New York.RELATED SITES: Dancer in the Dark |
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