You can call it Dogme 95, you can call its pretentious credo a "Vow of Chastity", I call it amateurish filmmaking and I say to hell with it.

Danish director Lars Von Trier is one of the founders of the Dogme 95 movement, which purports to strip filmmaking of its artifice and return it to its low-tech roots. However, to paraphrase conservative philosopher/Buddha Herman Kahn, you cannot uninvent that which has been invented. Even the great D.W. Griffith tried to push the medium of film to its technical limits of the time. Von Trier and his cohorts may be right to protest the devolution of film into a morass of effects-driven dreck, but this critic doesn't buy the idea that a return to fifty-cent film school technique is the answer.

Von Trier's latest and most controversial film, DANCER IN THE DARK, is at its core nothing more than a remake of Dennis Potter's bizarre and poignant Pennies from Heaven, with Icelandic pop diva Bjork in the role of the music-besotted romantic originated by Bob Hoskins, and later on, in Herbert Ross' 1981 film, by Steve Martin.

Bjork is Selma , a Czech immigrant working in a state of Washington metalworking foundry in 1964, with friend Kathy (Catherine Deneuve), who helps her get around the vision checks required by her job. She is going blind from a hereditary disease, and has a son, Gene (Vladan Kostic ) who will also go blind without an operation for which she has been saving ones fives, and tens for years. She rents a trailer from local sheriff Bill (David Morse) and his spendthrift wife Linda (Cara Seymour) and fends off the well-intentioned advances of the slow-witted Jeff. She escapes from the quiet desperation of her hand-to-mouth life by rehearsing the role of Maria in the local community theatre's production of The Sound of Music and by floating off into daydreams of production numbers performed by her co-workers in a sort of technopop road company of Stomp. Selma's daydream musicals address the shortcoming of the movies: "...you just when it goes really big and the camera goes like out of the roof and you just know it's going to end. I hate that. I would leave just after the next to last song. And the film would just go on forever."

Sheriff/landlord Bill, having learned of her cash stash, decides it is the answer to his financial problems. Tragedy ensures, and Selma is ultimately faced with a difficult and heartbreaking decision.

The first half of DANCER IN THE DARK is self-indulgently arty, with the world's longest and most pointless opening non-credit sequence. Von Trier's hand-held camera pans back and forth between characters, cutting off heads and looking little better than your Great-Aunt Sadie's home movies of your cousin Marvin's bar mitzvah. The musical numbers, unlike Pennies from Heaven's lavishly-costumed Busby Berkeley-style production numbers, are boring, badly choreographed, and amateurish. With their dour, cynical lyrics, sung in Bjork's primal scream of a voice. they hardly seem an escape from anything.

Von Trier's Washington state circa 1964 looks surprisingly like Sweden, which subs for the Timber state, and for some strange reason, its movie theatre seems to show only Depression-era musicals. It is populated by a surprising number of immigrants, including Catherine Deneuve's far-too-elegant factory worker. The role of Cathy was clearly written for a black woman, and although it is somewhat amusing to watch the still-beautiful Deneuve strutting her stuff like Aretha Franklin in The Blues Brothers, it's a monumental piece of miscasting.

The one aspect of DANCER that keeps it from being excruciating is an astonishingly raw, emotional performance by first-time actress Bjork. She seems to take a while to become the role, but her Selma has a steely innocence and inner beauty that transcends her plain dresses, stocky body, and stringy hair. Her vaguely Asian face is placid, yet expressive, and the viewer has the uncomfortable sense that we are watching a complete emotional breakdown, even more so that with Emily Watson's overly mannered performance in the Von Trier's misogynistic and overrated Breaking the Waves. In this reviewer's opinion, they should just give Bjork the Academy Award and save Julia Roberts the trouble of showing up. It's a devastating, breathtaking performance that apparently affected the actress/singer so deeply she has no intention of acting again.

It's interesting to note that for all Von Trier's trumpeting of Dogme 95, this film violates at least two items in the "Vow of Chastity", in that the film takes place in another time, and utilizes music for effect. Yet for all its flaws, and they are myriad, the film is worth seeing for the brief and shining acting career of the strange and astonishing Bjork Guðmundsdóttir.

- Jill Cozzi

Review text copyright © 2000 Jill Cozzi and Cozzi fan Tutti, © 2003 Mixed Reviews. All rights reserved. Reproduction of text in whole or in part in any form or in any medium without express written permission of Mixed Reviews or the author is prohibited.

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