Shadow dancing

>> Lars von Trier on Dancer in the Dark, melodrama vs. reality, and why Bjoerk is not an actress

by JOANNE LATIMER

"It was terrible," confessed director Lars von Trier, about the making of his latest film, Dancer in the Dark. He was at Cannes for the world premiere and the conveyor belt of press interviews was getting him down. He looked puffy and tired. No one, apparently, could resist asking about the bad blood on the set of his latest film and the epic blowouts between the director and his star, Bjoerk.

"It would be perverse today to give so much importance to the situation on set--the tension, the crying," said von Trier, retired Dogme daddy and Danish pop icon. "Bjoerk is a wonderful person, but she can't act. Bjoerk is not an actress. She isn't acting in this film; she's feeling things. It's hard. For her, it was like being the dying person [she plays in the film]. Let's not make this the centre of the film. It's too little."

Wait a minute. I'd heard that exact line from the film's co-star, Catherine Deneuve, at a press conference earlier that day. Von Trier had obviously created a script of approved comments about the Bjoerk Issue and everyone was sticking to it.

It turned out to be a good move, because Bjoerk showed up at the end of the festival to accept the Best Female Performance award. The cast was all huggy-kissy, with no knives sticking out of the back of Bjoerk's outrageous pink party dress.



A polarized response

While all traces of acrimony vanished between Bjoerk and von Trier, the fight had just begun among the press corps. Critics were divided--vehemently--over von Trier's film. It seemed moronic to get so worked up over a musical, but when it snagged the Palme d'Or, sociological debates were raging along the Croisette about the film's split personality: half tragedy, half dance numbers from a Gap commercial. Shouldn't the winner be more brooding? Shouldn't it have been shot on 35mm, not video?

"My film is a big film--a musical melodrama colliding with reality," explained von Trier, absentmindedly twisting the corner of his T-shirt. Considering that von Trier's entire body of film work has been screened in the official program at Cannes, he was quite anxious about his genre experiment.

Von Trier's romantic fatalism can be accused of conflicting with the catchy dance tunes in Dancer. Viewers will either like that tension or find it silly. Dancer is about Selma, a Czech immigrant (Bjoerk) working in an American tool factory. She's a single mom who tries to hide the fact that she's going blind. Selma is squirrelling away money to pay for an operation that will save her son from the same fate. Her best friend at work, Cathy (Deneuve), and her landlords (David Morse and Cara Seymour) are her only support system.

Bjoerk is marvellous as the naive Selma. While rehearsing for a small-town production of The Sound of Music, Bjoerk's Selma daydreams about performing in a Hollywood musical. She also slips into fantasy routines while clocking hours on the factory floor, where the cacophonous shop noises blend into her dreams.



A vision on video

"No one moves like Bjoerk," admitted von Trier, whose parents thought musicals were superficial and forbade a TV in the house. "We began to call her movements 'Bjoerkisms.'"

At odds with the tradition of American musicals--along with a few other things--is the fact that Dancer was shot on video. Von Trier used 100 Sony digital cameras to shoot the dance numbers and ended up with 120 hours of footage from the same scene.

Dancer's bleached colours, a telltale video quality, were brightened up for the musical scenes. The effect is astounding and choreographer Vincent Paterson knows how to overwhelm us, which makes it all the harder to hack when the storyline starts its downward spiral. Selma ends up on death row, of all places, sacrificing her life for her son's eye operation.

"But I'm not making the point that women should sacrifice themselves, which is what people said about Breaking the Waves. Some called it Breaking the Wives,'' added von Trier.

In the end, Dancer will benefit from the bickering about whether von Trier used the wrong tools to make a musical. How could they be wrong? They made me believe the execution song in the final scene.

No small task, for sure.

Dancer in the Dark is the opening film of the New Film & Media Festival, which runs Oct. 12-22