Dancer in the Dark

Lars Von Trier.

Whether you love him or hate him, you love him or hate him. There is no middle ground in a Von Trier film and as such no middle ground in audience reception. Some find him a artistic provocateur, others just think he's an immature shit-stirrer. Watch Margaret and David review any Von Trier film and you will get both of these opinions voiced with equal passion. Say what you like about him, at least you walk out of a Von Trier feeling SOMETHING, when so much cinema just leaves an underwhelming numbness.

First a little background; Lar Von Trier does not like the United States of America. This is of course an understatement for anyone who has seen Dogville or Manderlay, but for Von Trier virgins it is important to know. The Danish director boasts about the fact he has never actually visited the country so his main contact with the United States has been through cinema, and the discrepancies between the America of Hollywood and the America of reality seem to have left Von Trier bitter and angry towards the United States.

And it is with these execratory feelings that Von Trier made Dancer in the Dark a post modern musical starring everyone's favourite Icelandic songstress Bjork. The plot you ask? Selma (Bjork) is a metal press worker who is slowly going blind. She knows her son will also go blind, as her condition is genetic, so she is saving as much money as she can in order to pay for surgery that will cure him. Unfortunately her seemingly nice natured neighbour Bill steals the money to pay for his wife's...everything, and Selma then kills him in the most awkward murder scene ever filmed. She's subsequently put on trial subsequently executed as a murderous half blind communist.

Hollywood cinema portrays American not as it exists in reality, but projects an ideal to which it feels it can reach but, in Von Trier's opinion, never will. Selma's tragic fate occurs as a result of being an outsider who tries to reconcile the representation of Hollywood America and America itself. This in direct conflict with what occurs in the Hollywood musical, where the outsider, customarily the catalyst for the narrative, is eventually accepted and loved. the film opens with Selma in rehearsals as Maria for a production of The Sound of Music, which to an audience viewing the film in the 21st century would immediately conjure up images of Julie Andrews twilring on a hilltop. However, Dancer in the Dark is set in 1964, the year prior to the film's release, which means that Selma is making her characterisation independent of the canonical Hollywood musical's portrayal. She is playing someone else's part. Bitch is gonna feel some pain.

I hate Bjork. Her voice sounds like a gay brain damaged cat whether she is singing or not, so casting her in a musical, a genre I have always loved, seems like the universe's way of delivering me a cinematic 'Fuck you.' Von Trier marks the shifts from reality to Selma's dream songs with a slight change in picture quality, so after about 3 songs this shift would produce an almost pavlovian reaction of 'Oh shit' in anticipation of the aural raping I was about to endure. There is no real film criticism in this paragraph, just some venting I did not get to do in the essay I wrote about the film. For some reason academics frown on likening a filmic experience to sex crime.

In a typical Hollywood musical, removing the musical sequences would make the plot completely senseless, as the songs are meant to be advancing the story. In Dancer in the Dark, no such necessity exists for the musical numbers, which all take place solely in Selma's imagination (a point that is particularly obvious when Selma shares a dance with a corpse) so minus the musical numbers Selma appears to be vacant, then naive, then remorseless. It is no surprise that the jury delivers a guilty verdict for murder in the bland degree and sentences her to death. The sentence would have almost certainly been carried out right then and there in the courtroom had they heard any of her singing.

It is a testament to Von Trier's filmmaking that when Selma drops through the floor with a noose around her neck, I didn't cheer. The moment delivered the emotional punch it was meant to and it is for that reason that I cannot bring myself to say I hate the film. Bjork is awful and Selma shits me to tears, but it still manages to provoke compassion, so for it to have overcome its less appealing elements in such a way is very impressive.

Dancer in the Dark, 2000. Dir. Lars Von Trier.

The Man Who Fell To Earth

Ahh David Bowie. Your constantly evolving yet ever-androgynous identities have provided decades of entertainment, from Ziggy Starust to Nikola Tesla.

So it's a shame that The Man Who Fell To Earth provides little in the way of entertainment. Its confusing, frustrating and aesthetically underwhelming (the desert train on Bowie's home planet seems to have been made out of yellow dirt) but seldom entertaining.

The story (for lack of a better word) revolves around Thomas Jerome Newton, an alien with an unexplained British passport, who sets about building a vast technological empire by owning the patents to a number of inventions based on his advanced alien technology. As always this advanced technology became outdated in less than a decade, and by today's standards would be considered laughably retro. The standard iPhone can perform nearly all of the functions of the inventions from which Newton earns his millions.

Unmarked jumps in time make figuring out what's going on difficult at first, but once Newton meets Mary-Lou (Candy Clark, which is a vastly more preposterous name than Mary-Lou) things become much easier to follow due to the fact that Mary-Lou's hair changes with every jump in chronology. In one 20 minute section of the film, Mary-Lou sports a bob, a beehive and whatever you would get if you stuck Sarah Palin and a starfish in a blender. Which wouldn't be a bad idea in practice. Eventually we learn Newton has come to Earth because his planet has run out of water, which makes his relocation to New Mexico a little mystifying, as the state is more famous for immigrant problems than copious supplies of water. Maybe he was just homesick. As mentioned earlier, we get fleeting glimpses of Newton's home planet and his heavily dehydrated family wandering through the desert dressed like futuristic scuba divers. Why they don't just take the dirt train to the tree lined mountains in the background is a question as pertinent as it is uninteresting.

The third corner in this perplexing triangle of a film is Rip Torn who plays Professor Nathan Bryce who spends his time bedding college students or uncovering potential conspiracies involving Newton’s company, World Enterprises. Hey, ever wanted to see a university student use Rip Torn's penis as a microphone? Me neither, but sure enough his nymphomaniac professor manages to get more action than Bowie, which just seems criminal. For six years a friend and I had looked forward to what we referred to as 'that David Bowie alien sex movie.' Not to say that David Bowie cock enthusiasts will be disappointed, it makes its fair share of appearances, there's just an air of dissatisfaction with the whole experience. Newton develops alcoholism, but instead of making him loud, belligerent and, well, interesting, it just mellows him out even more.

Is the film terrible? No, but nor is it interesting enough to warrant a second viewing. Or to justify a $10 price tag.

The Man Who Fell To Earth, 1976. Dir. Nicolas Roeg.