negevoli-44 Review of Dancer in the Dark

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

SPOILER!!! As if this movie needed help. Stinkeroo, as they used to say in the good old days.

[1/10 · 8 November 2000]

SPOILERS AHEAD This movie is so unremittingly "TRAJ-EEK" it is funny. My friend and I went for coffee afterwards and wound up laughing so hard while dissecting it that we were crying! I'm afraid we made a bit of a scene, but hopefully the other coffee drinkers got the message to stay away from this one. One wonders why the filmmakers did not just send Selma (Bjork) straight to hell -- do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Apparently that is the only terrible fate she managed to escape in her short, unkempt, unbelievably harsh and unbearable life. What really kills this movie -- I refuse to call it a flim -- is that nothing about it makes any sense. A near-blind, delusional young mother would rather let her and her 10-year-old son, a true innocent, suffer unnecessarily in silence than stoop to asking for and accept help from well-meaning co-workers. She quickly goes blind from this hereditary disease that also affects her young son and because the United States offers a better life and medical care (except the neurotic director -- and I am being kind -- wouldn't take a plane to the USA for authentic locales so the movie was shot in Sweden, which throws the whole thing off kilter from the get-go. You keep thinking, what the hell? You don't even see a filling station, TV antenna, McDonalds -- nothing that would make it recognizably America -- and this is the early 1960s. A major distraction.) Selma and son wind up isolated in Sweden-America in the bleakest of circumstances. She works in a factory that looks like it is located behind the old Iron Curtain. She apparently thinks she is being noble by not accepting any help from anybody, including a perfectly nice man who is in love with her!!!! -- she refused a ride home from him and is almost run over by a truck. She'd rather stumble along the railroad tracks to find her way home than accept this small favor. For psychic relief, she fantasizes about Hollywood musicals (only her fantasies are as bleak as her real life, so how can they offer any escape?), deprives herself and her son of any amenities (she doesn't want the son to know he is destined to go blind) and pretends to send money home to her father while socking it away for her son's eye operation only to have it stolen, clumsily (and most artifically) kills the friend who stole the money, goes on trial, is convicted and hanged because she thinks it is nobler to be hanged than betray the friend who stole her money. Oh, how noble can you get. And she won't see the son in jail, because she's too noble Bjork does a fantastic acting job. It's just too bad she couldn't comb her hair at least once. I can comb my hair with my eyes shut, for goodness sake. That's it, folks. If this is what you want in a flick, they be my guest. At least you might get a good laugh out of it afterwards.