Scandinavian Rhapsody

LARS YON TRIER'S DANCER IN THE DARK

Dancer in the Dark, the latest film by the Danish director Lars von Trier, is by turns brilliant, wrenching, exhausting, preposterous, brutal, silly, and sublime. It is also outrageously sentimental, almost avantgarde in its mawkishness. Can shamelessness serve as a kind of formal conceit? This is the movie Stanley Kubrick might have made if he had harbored an untoward passion for silent-movie weepies, though the plot—about a single mother who is going blind while scrimping and saving for an operation that will allow her son to avoid the same fate—might have made even D. W. Griffith gag. And yet, like Griffith, von Trier and his collaborators tackle the material with such furious conviction, and with such glee at the possibilities of filmmaking, that the movie may leave you simultaneously devastated and exhilarated. This is the most audacious film I've seen in years, maybe since Apocalypse Now. Did I mention it's a musical?

HOT REELS

The numbers owe an obvious debt to works such as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Pennies from Heaven, but von Trier finds a poetry of his own as he incorporates trains, wind, even an old sewer pipe, into dance sequences; immobility itself takes on kinetic meaning when our poor, misunderstood heroine is packed off to prison. Bjork, the Icelandic pop star> plays a naifish role very similar to Emily Watson's in Breaking the Waves, the 1996 art-house hit in which von Trier also displayed a flair for authorial sadism. Here, whether singing or speaking—the film is in English— Bjork sounds uncannily like Marlee Matlin; this may or may not be a standard Icelandic accent, I don't know, but it does heighten the pathos of a terrific, if not always steady, performance that won Bjork the best-actress award at Cannes. Dancer in the Dark also received the Palme d'Or as best film, along with some lacerating reviews—Variety called it "artistically bankrupt on almost every level." Even the most generous critic would have to admit that at points it flies spectacularly off the rails, and who knows, in a different mood on a different day, I might have hated it, too. A musical where a blind woman sings "My Favorite Things" to herself in solitary? They can map the human genome, but the alchemy between movie and moviegoer remains a mystery. (Rating: ★★★★)

BRUCE HANDY