With the help of family, perhaps? They, too, are a mystery.īut still we haven't reached the peak of this Kilimanjaro of absurdity. There is no discussion whatever of the father of Selma's child - can't he put his hand in his pocket? - and no mention of how Selma got over to the US from Czechoslovakia. Furthermore, there is the casual haziness about the nature of this eye problem and the necessary remedial "operation". So the gruyère plot does not stand up to the most cursory inspection. (The state authorities have for some reason allowed Selma to keep this money, although they believe that she has stolen it from the cop, and that theft is the motive for murder!) On death row, Selma learns that a lawyer can get her off, but martyr that she is, she can't accept his help because his fee happens to be equivalent to the money she needs for Gene's surgery. Confronting him and getting her money back leads to violence and tragedy. Poor Selma is going blind! And her poor son Gene is going blind as well! And she's going without and saving up money in a tin box for Gene's "operation" - but this is stolen from her by a wicked policeman. But his story appears to have been plagiarised from a 12-year-old's English composition homework. Well, no one's doubting the crude determination with which Dogme's own PT Barnum delivers his bizarre incendiary assault on our emotions. And there are few films which could aspire, or want to aspire to the extravaganza of unreflective emoting and pain that Lars von Trier cheerfully expects us to endure. Screen acting doesn't get much more dire than this, or at least I really hope not. As well as conferring the romance and glamour of disability on this bestselling international recording artist, this conceals her inability or unwillingness to inter-relate in any way whatever with the other actors in the film. Björk's role requires her to be almost blind as well, wearing a pair of coke-bottle lenses that make her eyes look even tinier and piggier than usual. She plays Selma, the poor Czech immigrant factory worker in small-town America, scrimping every penny to bring up her myopic son by herself and daydreaming ecstatically about the musicals she adores, and the action is regularly interspersed with these fantasy song-and-dance sequences. Everything about it is silly, from the faux naivety and implausibility of its plot to the secret little idiot savant smile on the face of its Victim Heroine played by Björk - a squeaking, chirruping diva turn sufficient to curdle every carton of milk within a 10-kilometre radius. For its sheer effrontery, for its browbeating melodrama and pseudo-tragedy, Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark has to be the most sensationally silly film of the year - as well as the most shallow and crudely manipulative.
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