Lars Von Trier
Dancer In The Dark

Don't come to me later saying that I haven't done a review but just rambled about my mental rants on the film; I already know, you should know too, I don't want to review this film but just talk about it, end of story.

"Dancer in the Dark", just to be upfront, is a beautiful, intense, original, and heartbreaking film: it tells the very sad story of Selma, a Björk with very thick glasses yet truly convincing, who is an immigrant with a young son working in a factory. This plot introduction already suggests the film is not exactly lighthearted, unfortunately, Lars von Trier also chose to add that Selma is going blind, gets unjustly fired, gets arrested, gets evicted, and even her son will go blind. So, what joy.

Even though I generally prefer a completely different type of film ("They shot your father not for personal reasons, but for business. Nothing personal, it's business"), this "Dancer In The Dark" enchanted me. Why? Because it's a musical (I hadn't mentioned that yet), and because the way it is a musical is light-years away from the chicness of "Footloose" or "Chorus Line" or any other junk by Andrew Lloyd Weber. Selma is a factory worker who loves to drift away with her mind, spurred by the factory's noises until she imagines songs and choreographies in her mind that materialize on the screen, making this film a musical, but when, after the splendid imaginative escape, reality hits back, the impact is always traumatic, someone is always scolding her for being distracted at work or for risking breaking the machines. There's no time to "dream."
This is the film's most original device: the musical genre is no longer synonymous with stereotypical beauty and happiness (where everyone loves each other and, out of nowhere, starts dancing happily and joyfully), but this joy of dance and music is only in the protagonist's mind; reality is much, much tougher.
Once you understand this, it's clear that the plot is nothing but a pretext: if what the director is interested in is highlighting the gap between the joy (fake and imagined of the choreographies in Selma's head) and reality, raw and bare, it's functional for the film that reality is as terrible as possible. In other words: this film is beautiful but sneaky, and now I'll try to explain why.

Von Trier, in my opinion, had this idea of contrasting the stereotypical happiness of musicals with the much less happy reality, and he developed the plot based on this. In order for this contrast between imagined joy and real unhappiness to work, the plot needed to be as sad as possible. That's why Selma is an immigrant, she is blind, loses her job, has her money stolen... because the protagonist must have a horrible life to emphasize that, for her, happiness can only exist in her imagination.
So Von Trier did a great job imagining such a heartbreaking plot, but precisely, he excelled from a strictly technical point of view, not an artistic one. It's as if Von Trier sat down at a table and decided to make us cry: he had this idea of the contrast between musicals and reality and thus needed the saddest story possible, and he wrote it... but this isn't art, it's technique; it's skill in bringing the audience where you want them (in this case, to tears), it's the "science of making people cry."

I didn't cry, but this film is truly moving, it's just that you have to absorb it before realizing there's no message, there's no purpose in this film (not that films necessarily have to, but generally it's better when they do). In short, Lars Von Trier was good at moving us all, but that's precisely the point... he was good, he wasn't "an artist."

Ps: I realize that in this review, I've only tried to explain my mental rants about this film; now I'll try to make up for it and give you some more information, as a good non-reviewer: the film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes (more than deservedly), Björk is simply wonderful and brilliant as an actress, too, and the music, of course, was done by her along with Deodato (who, for those who don’t know, is great). The film's soundtrack is available under the title "Selma's Songs" and is practically another album rightfully belonging to the Icelandic singer's discography. Cheers and kisses.