•
Rating:
Me and the film
I saw Dancer in the Dark for the first time in 2001. I left my favorite cinema hall moved. More than twenty years later, at the fifth or sixth viewing, the emotion has more than doubled (alas, age and love make the heart weak).
I can say with certainty that Dancer in the Dark will never age because it masterfully represents an ancestral, universal, and eternal feeling: maternal love.
The plot and themes
The film tells the story of Selma Ježková, mother of Gene, who has taken it upon herself as a life mission to secretly collect money for an operation that would prevent her son from going blind due to a genetic flaw. For Selma's eyes, in fact, it is already too late, but for Gene's, it is not.
The sacrifice of Selma for him is the crux, the core of the story. And to accomplish her mission, she puts herself aside: romantic love, daily gestures of affection, immediate joys "do not interest her at this moment".
A true force of nature, no obstacle seems to be able to stop her. Yet, when she is just a step away from the goal and her eyes no longer let light through, she lets go of those confidences forgotten inside the armor she had built...
...and that family that had welcomed her, that industrial suburb that had become hers, that nation that had given her hope, transform and show their other face. Where hospitality and kindness once resided, hostility and cruelty now prevail, resentment and distrust: her main fault is being different from the herd, bearing the mark of her distant origins.
Besides the universal story, it is therefore this moralizing, puritanical, fundamentalist society that is the target of the Danish director's arrows; just as it was in the past in Breaking the Waves and as it will be in the future in Dogville. A two-faced society, composed "of good and honest people who love their town", but who, to defend it, are ready to transform from lambs into wolves.
And along with them, Selma's American dream turns into a nightmare.
Lars' eye and objective reality
Von Trier's eye does not censor anything in Selma's dramatic story; with a handheld camera, it enters her spaces, the theater hall, the factory, the trailer, and the cell; it reveals her behaviors, her worries, and her hopes going up in smoke.
All black, in short.
And yet, someone might say: - And hope? There needs to be a bit of hope.
But no, for Von Trier there is no hope of transforming the majority while traveling on one's own tracks towards other directions, because it will do everything to survive and preserve itself, as it is accustomed to. To prevent the exception from blooming.
He sees no hope for his protagonists; for those, like Selma, who are minorities, he sees no possibility of seeking their own space in society by moving gently, without overtaking others or standing on their shoulders.
The reality is black.
The musical and hope
However, if in reality there is no space for it, in fantasy there is still a glimmer of light. In it, music and dance give back what reality denies. Primarily, they return images to Selma, but they also give her an ideal world where judges and defendants, workers and foremen, guards and prisoners all dance together.
And so, facing the tragic real epilogue, Selma can assert the defense of her fantastic kingdom through the words that close the film:
They say it's the last Song
They don't know us, you see
It's only the last song
If we let It be
Loading comments slowly
