Dancer In The Dark (2000)

Denmark/Germany/Netherlands/USA
written and directed by: Lars von Trier
starring: Björk, Catherine Deneuve, Peter Stormare, Siobhan Fallon Hogan
seen: 24th November. 2008, additional comment: 30th July, 2017

2008: Well, I'm having a dilemma. I've been on several dates with Mr. Trier before and I've been, so far, almost always thoroughly amazed. But I am also a bit of a skeptic and I have hard time believing in the existence of such geniuses, so to get to my point, I was prepared to be as critical as humanly possible when I set out to watch Dancer in the Dark.

The film starts slow and easy, almost making the viewer (me) wondering how it can ever reach the ending it's supposed to reach. And then the viewer stops thinking about such nonsense as she's being dragged in by the power of the extraordinary point of view on such ordinary reality. The song "I've seen it all" has a devastating effect on the emotionaly disturbed girl and makes her completely identify with the heroine. The sudden story twist screams: "I am illogical. I don't seem to organically belong. I am forced to the extreme!" The viewer's brain is working double shifts to understand it and then the disarraying ending wreaks havoc in the subconsciousness.

And now back to first person writing: All in all, even though the movie disagrees with me at some points and I do not think it's perfect the way I think Dogville is perfect, for the accurate work of describing the inner world of a resigned dreamer I am forced to give it highest marks.

-"You've never been to Niagara Falls?" -"I have seen water, it's water, that's all..."

2017: As I get older, my disagreeings with this film stay the same but my love for it grows bigger and bigger. The formal principle of combining the shaky docu camera for the "normal" life and montages of many static shots for the musical numbers is able to manipulate the viewer's point of view so brilliantly it deserves the highest praise solely for that. But wait, there's more. The actors work so accurately that every scene seems to be the best acted scene ever to be best acted. In some imaginary world I have no trouble ripping my heart from my chest, splitting it in half and giving those halves to Peter Stormare and Siobhan Fallon Hogan.

-"What is there to see?" ♥♥♥