It’s as brutally effective as it is brutally depressing. This payoff further drives home the feeling that Selma is fated to death. Almost every detail presented early in the film is referenced later. We see her casually mention that sharing is good in relation to communism, and she is set up as a communist at her trial. We see Selma warned to not use two plates on the machine, and then she does. Von Trier sets up domino after domino, and then knocks them over as they cascade to the film’s finale. The film’s plot is similarly operatic, a tragedy that the audience can see coming from miles away, the characters helplessly moved along by fate towards their demise. As the colors come in and out of focus to the music, we are given a visual metaphor for Selma’s declining vision. Even as the brass swells towards the end, with a sound that glimmers with hope, it then fades into nothingness, presaging that this film won’t have a happy ending. While Dancer in the Dark is a musical (in its own way at least), it feels more like an opera: the overture has a Wagnerian feel, opening with a drone that is sustained as the melody comes in, reminiscent of the opening to Das Rheingold.
DANCING IN THE DARK SONG SERIES
A series of abstract images come into view from a beige background, while the overture swells. Selma is convicted of murder, in part because she refuses to disclose Bill’s secret, and is sentenced to death.įrom the opening visuals, we see that von Trier is moving away from the self-imposed restrictions of Dogme 95 he used in The Idiots. Bill steals Selma’s savings, and when Selma confronts him, an ensuing scuffle results in Bill’s inadvertent death. Selma in turn confides that she is going blind and saving money for her son’s operation. Bill confides in Selma that he has burned through his inheritance due to his wife’s ( Cara Seymour) spending, but he is too cowardly to tell his wife the truth. She daydreams constantly, turning her life into a musical production in her head – and onscreen.Īll of Selma’s hard work is undone by her friendship with her landlord, Bill ( David Morse), the town sheriff who came into a small fortune through inheritance. The only escape Selma allows herself is into the world of musicals, both on-screen and by performing in a local production of The Sound of Music. She takes on extra shifts at the factory and makes handmade cards to sell, avoiding most other interactions and rebuffs the advances of Jeff ( Peter Stormare), a man hopelessly infatuated with Selma. Selma saves every extra penny she has to afford an operation for her son Gene, so he won’t suffer the same fate, but also refuses to tell Gene or anyone else, claiming she is sending the money to her father in Czechoslovakia.
She hides her condition from everyone but her close friend Kathy ( Catherine Deneuve), who Selma calls Cvalda. Selma suffers from a degenerative eye condition that will eventually leave her blind. Set in Washington state in 1964, Dancer in the Dark is the tragedy of Selma Jezkova (Björk), a Czechoslovakian immigrant working in a factory.
Ultimately, “I’ve Seen it All” lost to Bob Dylan’s “Things Have Changed” from Wonder Boys, but Björk’s swan dress and Dancer in the Dark have remained in the cultural memory ever since. His abrasive scripts and experimental style made him loved and loathed alike by cinephiles, but generally unknown in the mainstream. Prior to Dancer in the Dark, he was best known for his involvement with Dogme 95, a film movement that eschewed normal filmmaking conventions by utilizing only hand-held cameras, diegetic sound, filming only on location, along with seven other restrictions. She attended the Academy Awards to perform her nominated song “I’ve Seen it All,” from her 2000 film Dancer in the Dark, directed by Lars von Trier, another Scandinavian outsider from the Hollywood mainstream. Decked out in a swan dress designed by her friend Marjan Pejoski, with a matching egg purse, her outfit was as iconoclastic as the Icelandic singer. On March 25, 2001, Björk walked onto the Oscar red carpet and into fashion history.
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