Dancer in the Dark
Dancer in the Dark is a 2000 psychological tragedy musical film written and directed by Lars von Trier. It stars Icelandic musician Björk as a factory worker who suffers from a degenerative eye condition and is saving 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, Selmasongs, was written mainly by Björk, but a number of songs featured contributions from Mark Bell and some of the lyrics were written by von Trier and Sjón.
Dancer in the Dark is the third and final installment in von Trier's second trilogy "Golden Heart", following Breaking the Waves and The Idiots. It was an international co-production among companies based in thirteen European and North American countries and regions. Like the first installment, it was shot with a handheld camera inspired by Dogme 95.
Dancer in the Dark premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival and won the Palme d'Or, along with the Best Actress Award for Björk. The film received generally positive reviews, with Björk's performance being widely praised.
The song "I've Seen It All" performed and co-written by Björk, with Sjón and von Trier, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song, but lost to "Things Have Changed" by Bob Dylan from Wonder Boys.
Plot
In Washington State in 1964, Selma Ježková, a Czech immigrant, has moved to the United States with her 12-year-old 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 local police officer Bill Houston and his wife, Linda. She is romantically pursued by the shy but persistent Jeff.Selma is gradually losing her vision due to a degenerative eye condition, but still is saving money to pay for an operation that will prevent Gene from sharing her fate. 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 Hollywood musicals, as Kathy describes them to her.
In her day-to-day life, Selma slips into daydreams, imagining herself in a musical. Jeff and Kathy begin to realize that Selma's vision is worse than they thought, and that she has been memorizing eye charts in order to pass vision tests and keep her job. Bill reveals to Selma that Linda's excessive spending has put the couple's house in danger of foreclosure by their bank. He has contemplated suicide but cannot bring himself to carry out the act. Selma promises to keep his secret and confides in him about her advancing vision loss. Bill pretends to leave, but watches Selma hide her money in a tin.
The next day, Selma's boss Norman believes that her eye condition has deteriorated; he accepts her resignation and pays her final wages, but promises to re-hire her once her sight has improved. However, Kathy accuses him of firing her. Not willing to get her job back, Jeff tries to escort her home by car, but she walks home along a railroad bridge instead. Opening the tin to add her money to it, Selma finds it empty. Realizing that Bill has robbed her, she goes to his house to confront him. Linda accuses Selma of trying to seduce her husband, explaining that Bill told her Selma wanted him for his money. Not wanting to reveal her knowledge of the impending foreclosure, Selma ignores Linda and confronts Bill about the theft. They fight over the money, with Bill drawing a gun only to be accidentally shot by Selma.
Bill yells for Linda to call the police, saying that Selma has tried to rob him, then begs Selma to kill him, telling her it is the only way she will ever reclaim her stolen money. Selma shoots Bill several times, but only wounds him further due to her poor vision, and finally beats him to death with her safe deposit box once the gun runs out of ammunition. She imagines that Bill's corpse stands up and slow dances with her, and he and Linda absolve her of blame and tell her she just did what she had to do. Taking her money back, she flees the house and pays for Gene's operation in advance.
Not knowing about the murder, Jeff takes Selma to rehearsal, where her director calls the police to have her arrested. In court, she is accused of being a Communist sympathizer and of pretending to be blind to exploit the American healthcare system. 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, even though revealing the secret could help to clear her name. When her claim of sending all her money to her father, Oldřich Nový, is proven false, she is convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Kathy and Jeff eventually figure out what happened and recover Selma's money, using it instead to pay for a trial lawyer who can free her. Selma refuses the lawyer, opting to face execution by hanging rather than let her son go blind, but she is deeply distraught as she awaits her death. As Selma reaches the gallows, she begins to panic and the guards strap her to a board. Kathy runs in with news that the operation has saved Gene's vision and gives his glasses to Selma. Relieved, Selma sings one final song on the gallows with no musical accompaniment, but is hanged before she can finish the last verse; the final lines are displayed as the proceedings conclude.
Cast
Production
The film's title suggests the Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse duet "Dancing in the Dark" from the 1953 film The Band Wagon, which ties in with the film's musical theatre theme.Much of the film has a similar look to von Trier's earlier Dogme 95 films, being filmed on low-end handheld digital cameras to create a documentary-style appearance. It is precluded from being a true Dogme 95 film due to breaking the Dogme 95 rules which ban violence, period pieces, and non-diegetic music. Von Trier differentiates the musical sequences from the rest of the film by using static cameras and by brightening the colours.
Icelandic singer Björk had almost never acted before starring in the film, and described the process as so emotionally taxing that she did not want to act again. However, she eventually appeared in Drawing Restraint 9 and The Northman. Von Trier and others have described her performance as feeling rather than acting. Björk later clarified that she was not put off acting by the film, rather that she never wanted to act at all but made an exception for von Trier.
The musical sequences were filmed simultaneously with over 100 digital cameras so that multiple angles of the performance could be captured and cut together later, thus shortening the filming schedule.
A Danish MY class locomotive and one T43 were painted in the American Great Northern scheme for the film, and not repainted afterward.
Music
- Original music: Björk
- Singers: Björk, Catherine Deneuve, Siobhan Fallon, David Morse, Cara Seymour, Edward Ross, Joel Grey, Peter Stormare
- Lyrics: Björk, Lars von Trier and Sjón
- Non-original music: Richard Rodgers
- Non-original lyrics: Oscar Hammerstein II
- Choreographer: Vincent Paterson
Controversy
Reception
Critical response
At the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Dancer in the Dark earned positive reviews from 69% of 120 critics, with an average rating of 7.3/10. The critics consensus on the website reads, "Dancer in Dark can be grim, dull, and difficult to watch, but even so, it has a powerful and moving performance from Björk and is something quite new and visionary". According to Metacritic, which assigned the film a weighted average score of 63/100 based on 33 critic reviews, the film received "generally favorable reviews".On The Movie Show, Margaret Pomeranz gave it five stars while David Stratton gave it a zero, a score shared only by Geoffrey Wright's Romper Stomper. Stratton later described it as his "favourite horror film". Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian dubbed Dancer in the Dark the "most shallow and crudely manipulative" film of 2000, and in 2009 he described it as "one of the worst films, one of the worst artworks and perhaps one of the worst things in the history of the world".
The film was praised for its stylistic innovations. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote: "It smashes down the walls of habit that surround so many movies. It returns to the wellsprings. It is a bold, reckless gesture". Edward Guthmann from the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: "It's great to see a movie so courageous and affecting, so committed to its own differentness". However, criticism was directed at its storyline. Jonathan Foreman of the New York Post described the film as "meretricious fakery" and called it "so unrelenting in its manipulative sentimentality that, if it had been made by an American and shot in a more conventional manner, it would be seen as a bad joke". Fiachra Gibbons, writing for The Guardian, considered the film to be "the most unusual, extraordinary feel-good musical ever made".
In 2016, David Ehrlich ranked Dancer in the Dark as one of the best films of the 21st century, hailing Björk's performance as the "single greatest feat of film acting" since 2000. Björk's performance is also ranked in the "25 Best Performances Not Nominated for an Oscar of the 21st Century" list. Mia Goth credited the performance as one of her main influences, dubbing it "perfect" and "faultless".
Box office
The film previewed on 12 screens in Denmark where it grossed 1,562,965 Danish krone. It officially opened in Scandinavia on 8 September 2000 where it grossed a disappointing $288,723 in its opening weekend. It grossed $103,102 from 49 screens in Denmark, finishing in second place behind X-Men. In Sweden, it opened in fifth place with a gross of 928,621 Swedish krona from 34 screens. It also opened in fifth place in Norway with a gross of 587,495 Norwegian krone. In Finland, it came sixth with a gross of 152,598 Finnish markka from six screens.Overall, it grossed $45.6 million worldwide, including $4.2 million in the United States and Canada. It was number one at the Japanese box office for three weeks.
Accolades
Dancer in the Dark premiered at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival and was awarded the Palme d'Or, along with the Best Actress award for Björk. The song "I've Seen It All" was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song, at the performance of which Björk wore her famous swan dress.Sight & Sound magazine conducts a poll every ten years of the world's finest film directors to find out the Ten Greatest Films of All Time. This poll has been going since 1952, and has become the most recognised poll of its kind in the world. In 2012, Cyrus Frisch was one of the four directors who voted for Dancer in the Dark. Frisch commented: "A superbly imaginative film that leaves conformity in shambles". Director Oliver Schmitz also lauded the work as "relentless, claustrophobic, the best movie about capital punishment as far as I'm concerned".
In 2025, it was one of the films voted for the "Readers' Choice" edition of The New York Times list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century," finishing at number 218.