Dancer In The Dark - Shit On A Silver Platter
Quick Thoughts: Dancer in the Dark (2000)
An immigrant mother with a passion for musicals falls into life's contingent viciousness.
I have a strong bias against Lars von Trier. With no particular reason at all, I think he's a vile creature, scum straight from the belly of a sewer, green like mucus, pungent like bile, thick in the head like bog mulch. He seems intent on making the cinema a place of misery and dimness, an ugly space, dismal and grey like his spirit, angst and dry like his heart, repulsive and retch-worthy like his smug face. I say this because he knows how to construct a great plot and preserve truly affective moments in a narrative. It is though he crouched one day in his wet cave and leafed through Poetics, taking from Aristotle the assertion that it is a succession of drama, of actions - the plot - that is primary in the constriction of narrative and tragedy, and decided to test this notion as rigorously as humanly possible. There is an undeniable poetry about, in particular, a von Trier work like The Idiots. It is a miresome plague of an aesthetic work, but intentionally so. This intent has no correlation to the telling of a story, but it certainly does not hinder completely the expressions of a tragic character arc. Dancer in the Dark shares this. I have tried to get through this film before, but shut it off soon after it started. Like Breaking the Waves, but maybe less intensely, the film repulsed me, making me feel physically sick and numbingly bored at the same time. Attempting to watch Dancer in the Dark with a stronger stomach, I pushed through the profound jank refusing to sigh or hold my face in my hands, trusting that--as always--something would shine through the drudgery. And it does.
I would certainly not hold Dancer in the Dark in as high a regard as The Idiots, or even the more recent, The House That Jack Built, as it doesn't achieve much in the way of character and merely masturbates with its bending of musical conventions. But, this is a film that manages to capture a queer condition; earnest yearning and honest desire. It is difficult to articulate precisely the consequences of this condition, but it is this that grabs hold of the spectator as they stare in derangement at the idiosyncrasies of the von Trier aesthetic. Try it if you haven't already, if you can.
An immigrant mother with a passion for musicals falls into life's contingent viciousness.
I have a strong bias against Lars von Trier. With no particular reason at all, I think he's a vile creature, scum straight from the belly of a sewer, green like mucus, pungent like bile, thick in the head like bog mulch. He seems intent on making the cinema a place of misery and dimness, an ugly space, dismal and grey like his spirit, angst and dry like his heart, repulsive and retch-worthy like his smug face. I say this because he knows how to construct a great plot and preserve truly affective moments in a narrative. It is though he crouched one day in his wet cave and leafed through Poetics, taking from Aristotle the assertion that it is a succession of drama, of actions - the plot - that is primary in the constriction of narrative and tragedy, and decided to test this notion as rigorously as humanly possible. There is an undeniable poetry about, in particular, a von Trier work like The Idiots. It is a miresome plague of an aesthetic work, but intentionally so. This intent has no correlation to the telling of a story, but it certainly does not hinder completely the expressions of a tragic character arc. Dancer in the Dark shares this. I have tried to get through this film before, but shut it off soon after it started. Like Breaking the Waves, but maybe less intensely, the film repulsed me, making me feel physically sick and numbingly bored at the same time. Attempting to watch Dancer in the Dark with a stronger stomach, I pushed through the profound jank refusing to sigh or hold my face in my hands, trusting that--as always--something would shine through the drudgery. And it does.
I would certainly not hold Dancer in the Dark in as high a regard as The Idiots, or even the more recent, The House That Jack Built, as it doesn't achieve much in the way of character and merely masturbates with its bending of musical conventions. But, this is a film that manages to capture a queer condition; earnest yearning and honest desire. It is difficult to articulate precisely the consequences of this condition, but it is this that grabs hold of the spectator as they stare in derangement at the idiosyncrasies of the von Trier aesthetic. Try it if you haven't already, if you can.
