Dancer in the Dark (Danish: Danser i mørket) is a 2000 musical melodrama film written and directed by Lars von Trier. It stars Icelandic musician Björk as a daydreaming immigrant factory worker who suffers from a degenerative eye condition and is saving up to pay for an operation to prevent her young son from suffering the same fate. Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, Cara Seymour, Peter Stormare, Siobhan Fallon Hogan and Joel Grey also star.
The soundtrack for the film, released as the album Selmasongs, was written mainly by Björk, but a number of songs featured contributions from Mark Bell and the lyrics were by von Trier and Sjón. Three songs from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music were also used in the film.
This is the third film in von Trier’s “Golden Heart Trilogy”; the other two films are Breaking the Waves (1996) and The Idiots (1998). The film was an international co-production among companies based in thirteen countries and regions: Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. It was shot with a handheld camera, and was somewhat inspired by a Dogme 95 look.
Dancer in the Dark premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival to standing ovations and controversy, but was nonetheless awarded the Palme d’Or, along with the Best Actress award for Björk. The song “I’ve Seen It All”, with Thom Yorke, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song but lost to “Things Have Changed” by Bob Dylan from Wonder Boys. The film polarized critics, with some deriding it as melodramatic and others lauding it as highly moving and innovative. The film later appeared on multiple lists of the best films of the 2000s.
Plot
In Washington state in 1964, Selma Ježková, a Czech immigrant has moved to the United States with her son, Gene Ježek. They live a life of poverty as Selma works at a factory with her good friend Kathy, whom she nicknames Cvalda. She rents a trailer home on the property of town policeman Bill Houston and his wife Linda. She is also pursued by the shy but persistent Jeff, who also works at the factory.
Selma has a degenerative eye condition and is losing her vision. She has been saving up to pay for an operation which will prevent her young son from losing his vision. She also takes part in rehearsals for a production of The Sound of Music and accompanies Kathy to the local cinema where together they watch fabulous Hollywood musicals, as Kathy describes them to her. Selma, going blind, memorizes the letters on an eye exam in order to keep her job at the factory. To prevent him from worrying, Selma keeps her son’s impending blindness a secret and instead tells him the money she’s saving for the operation is being sent to her father in Czechoslovakia.
In her day-to-day life, Selma slips into daydreams and fantasizes about her life as a musical.(“Cvalda”). Selma’s vision gradually worsens, to the point that she nearly gets hit by a car and then has to walk on the train tracks to find her way home.
Jeff soon figures out that Selma is going blind and she imagines herself in yet another musical number, explaining that she’s accepted her fate (“I’ve Seen it All”).
That night, Bill reveals to Selma that his materialistic wife Linda spends more than his salary, and the bank is going to take his house. To comfort Bill, Selma reveals that she’s going blind, hoping that together they can keep each other’s secret. Bill hides in the corner of Selma’s home, knowing she can’t see him, and watches as she puts some money in her kitchen tin.
Selma works an extra shift at the factory, asking if it’s “always been so dark in here” and, due to being nearly blind, accidentally breaks a machine and is fired from her job.
When she comes home to put her final wages away she finds the tin is empty; she goes next door to report the theft to Bill and Linda, only to hear Linda discussing how Bill has brought home their safe deposit box to count their savings.
Knowing that Bill was broke and that the money he is counting must be hers, she confronts him and attempts to take the money back. He draws a gun on her, and in a struggle he is wounded. Linda runs off to tell the police at Bill’s command. Bill then begs Selma to take his life, telling her that this will be the only way she will ever reclaim the money that he stole from her.
Selma shoots at him several times, but due to her blindness manages to only maim Bill further. In the end, she performs a coup de grâce by repeatedly hitting him in the face with the safe deposit box. Selma slips into a trance and imagines that Bill’s corpse stands up and slow dances with her, urging her to run to freedom (“Scatterheart”). She does, and takes the money to the Institute for the Blind to pay for her son’s operation before the police can take it from her.
Selma then leaves for rehearsal, where she requests a smaller part as she can no longer see her way around the stage. The director gladly obliges, and stays to talk to her (“In the Musicals”). It is then revealed that he knows what she’s done and calls the police. She is arrested and put on trial.
It is here that she is pegged as a Communist sympathizer and is charged with murder. Although she tells as much truth about the situation as she can, she refuses to reveal Bill’s secret, saying that she had promised not to.
Her claim that the reason she didn’t have any money was because she had been sending it to her father in Czechoslovakia is proven false, she is convicted and given the death penalty (“In the Musicals- Reprise”). Kathy and Jeff eventually put the pieces of the puzzle together and get back Selma’s money, using it instead to pay for a trial lawyer who can free her.
Selma becomes furious and refuses the lawyer, opting to face the death penalty rather than let her son go blind. Kathy relents and instead uses the money to pay for the operation. Selma, finally realizing that this means she’s about to die, begins to panic. Brenda, a sympathetic guard, helps calm Selma down and walks with her to the gallows (“107 Steps”).
Selma becomes terrified when the hood is placed over her face, and falls to the ground sobbing. She is strapped to a collapse board and screams for her son. Kathy rushes in and informs her that the operation was a success and that Gene will not go blind after all. Relieved, Selma sings on the gallows with no musical accompaniment (“Second to Last Song”). The trapdoor falls and Selma dies before she can finish the song. Two guards draw the curtain separating the viewing area from the gallows closed, and the scene fades into the credits.
~ Source Wiki