Copyright Commonweal Foundation Nov 3, 2000| [Headnote] |
| 'Dancer in the Dark' & `Get Carter' |
Few directors of late have sparked such vehement opinion as Lars von Trier, whose new film, Dancer in the Dark, won both cheers and jeers this year at Cannes. Von Trier's oeuvre includes The Kingdom, a creepy, Stephen King-like series for Danish television about a haunted hospital; Zentropa, a hypnotic and surreal trip into postwar Germany; and Breaking the Waves, with Emily Watson as a passionate naif who immolates herself on her husband's sadistic will. Von Trier is a director born for auteur theory. His films bear a signature stamp of harshness and lyricism, and are curiously assaultive of their audience, inducing powerful dream-like states of joy and then violently undercutting them.
Dancer in the Dark follows a Czech immigrant named Selma (played by the Icelandic pop singer, Bjork), who's stuck in a life of misery in Washington State in LBJ-era America. A single mother suffering a degenerative eye disease, she's going blind, and working double shifts in a steel-pressing plant to save for an eye operation for her similarly afflicted son. The film was actually shot in Sweden (von Trier doesn't fly), and makes only the most perfunctory stab at hiding its non-American settings and accents. But no matter, because von Trier soon makes clear that realism isn't exactly the program. Selma loves Broadway musicals, and escapes the backbreaking drudgery of her life through daydreams that transform the world around her into music and dance. "I've got little games I play when it's hard," she says to her would-be suitor, Jeff (Peter Stomare). "In the factory, the machines, they've got rhythms." In her imagination she starts to sing, and when others join in, Dancer in the Dark turns, against all odds, into a musical.
Von Trier is a leading member of the Dogma 95 movement, a group of Danish filmmakers who pledged themselves to ten cinematic "vows of chastity"handheld cameras, natural sound and lighting, no extravagant props or costumes, and so on. Dogma 95 productions include Soren Kragh-Jacobsen's Mifune and Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration, but its influence extends all the way to such homegrown films as The Blair Witch Project. Applying its rather severe principles to von Trier's own lavishly fantastic sensibility makes for a weird blend of aestheticism and asceticism. Dancer begins with a gorgeous abstract color show-shifting shapes of color set to swelling orchestral music-then abruptly dumps us into Dogma 95 reality mode. The camera wanders from face to face, like a home movie, and the film has a grainy, pale look, as if shot at precisely that point of dimming light where objects begin to lose their color: the look of incipient blindness, in other words.
Except during the musical numbers. Each time von Trier segues into one of Selma's musical dream sequences, Dancer in the Dark makes a Wizard of Oz-like shift into brilliant color. Selma sings and dances, performing pop arias (written by Bjork and von Trier ) of sorrow and hope--sparkly wish fulfil)ments in which a dead man rises and walks again, Selma's tormentors turn into comforters, and "there's always someone to catch me." Those who have wronged her and those she has wronged join together in literal choruses of forgiveness.
It's outrageous and incredibly campy, all these machine operators suddenly turned into whirling dancers-and it would be funny, if von Trier let it. But he doesn't; the splashes of color and soaring lyrics never entirely distract us from the underlying beat of doom. Dancer in the Dark has an absurdly melodramatic plot, involving a killing and subsequent trial, that's as trumped-up as any musical, but morbid in the extreme; it makes Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd seem like a walk in the park, with Selma croak ing "My Favorite Things" in a death-row cellblock. I won't reveal more of the ending except that it gives the most macabre twist to "Listen to your heart" in the annals of film. Von Trier takes grotesque ironies and puns, and plays them straight, manipulating events toward gallows humor-literally-and then refusing to let you laugh.
Like Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves, Bjork as Selma projects a childlike, oblivious joy. There's a poignant sweetness to her--she thanks the boss who fires her-and she's incapable of anger, even when betrayed (though she reacts with sudden animal violence when backed into a corner.) Such vulnerability is hard to watch, and-again as in Breaking the Waves-von Trier pushes his heroine along a curve of events so inexorable that a fatalistic mood seeps in from the start. All his movies feature a central death, and are suffused by a harsh, glowing religiosity less Christian than pagan; they have the feel of a sacrifice, a public spectacle with all the attendant energies of ecstasy, bloodlust, and dread.
Dancer in the Dark is an outlandish movie, turning camp into catharsis and fashioning a bizarre testament to the power of imagination in the face of suffering. People speak of von Trier as a love-him-or-hate-him director, but to me it's love him and hate him. He's maddening but fascinating, not in the least because he's so willfully contradictoryplacing himself in the aesthetic handcuffs of an austere dogma and then somehow wriggling his way out, Houdini style, into this film. As with any escape artist, the illusion will work to his advantage, as long as we're asking, "How did he do that?" and not "Why?"
Where Dancer in the Dark puts the musical to a wild array of ironic uses, Stephen Kay's Get Carter gives us another sturdy genre, film noir, and asks no more than that we sit back and bask in its tough-guy sorrows and shadows. The opening credits cite a novel by Ted Lewis, Jack's Return Home, but the ghost presence here is British director Mike Hodges's 1971 cult classic, Get Carter, which starred Michael Caine as Jack Carter (Sylvester Stallone has the role this time 'round), a gang enforcer come home to solve his brother's mysterious death and rack up a few badly needed redemption points for himself in the process.
Caine has a supporting role in the new film, and to see him as the recipient of hard-bitten lines he uttered three decades ago ("You're a big man, but you're out of shape and with me it's a full-time job, so sit down") makes for a nice nod of homage. Indeed, Get Carter faithfully serves up the elements of film noir. Rain-drenched streets at night; a hopelessly knotty plot; furious car chases; various scumbags crawling out from under various rocks (including Mickey Rourke as a smirking pornographer); cigarettes everywhere, and sunglasses, and mirrors-harsh reflections and oblique camera angles that suggest trouble lurking around every corner. The film is lighted in a metallic blue murk so dark, you feel like tearing off all those sunglasses in sheer frustration.
And yet despite hitting every touchstone, Get Carter misses the noir sensibility, and does so spectacularly. There's a cynical, mean-streets-hero intelligencethe Humphrey Bogart quality, if you will-that's absent, and without it the film veers between brutal and maudlin. Stallone lumbers through scene after scene, his massive frame shrink-wrapped in sky-blue suits with gleaming silk ties, his face decorated with scars and a Frankie Valli-style goatee. It isn't just a looks problem, either. "Did you ever wanna take every mirror in the world and get rid of it," he intones at one point, "'cause you didn't like what was coming back at you?" Caine's Carter would utter such words in an unguarded moment, then quickly hustle away from them, but Stallone plays his role with hangdog sorrow, as if pleading for a bone of sympathy. Kay and his screenwriter, David McKenna, violate noir's rule of allowing you only a peek, a dodging inference, at its hero's suffering soul. Maybe we're too needy for that by now, too hooked on pathos. This is noir for the age of Oprah.
Screen violence has changed since 1971 as well, and the current Get Carter is far more vicious, in a pumped-up, steroidal way, than the original. That too is a problem. Caine's menace emanated not from a WWF-sized body, but from inner layers of calculation and detachment, and a studied capacity for cruelty. His Carter hinted at literary origins (at the start he sat on a train reading Raymond Chandler)-the antihero as closet philosopher, whose fists and gun aren't just wreaking havoc with other people's bodies, but scoring points in an existential argument. Stallone's Carter, on the other hand, comes off as a mere thug. "You sit here and shut your mouth, ' he snarls, "or this is going to the next level."
Stallone can be a good-enough actor, but if a film doesn't land right in the narrow band of what he can do well, he's in trouble. Actually, Get Carter reminds you how effective he was as Rocky Balboa-the earnest inarticulateness, the sweet soul trapped inside that almost grotesque body. Rocky was not film noir, however, and Stallone seems laughably incapable of playing a character who's thinking on several levels at once; he gives the impression of having trouble with just one. Intelligence was what kept the original Get Carter moving, both its script and its star. Michael Caine was smart-quick enough on his feet to figure out a crime, outrun the bad guys, and keep tabs on the perilous state of his own soul. Stallone's Carter, on the other hand, is a plodder. He makes us pity him; and on the mean streets of a darkened theater, that's the deadliest error of all.
| [Photograph] |
| No Michael Caine |
My Research