In the beginning I thought she was funny, clumsy and even a bit stupid. Later on, after 10 minutes of Björk's voice, I realized how much I was falling in love with her character. Selma Jezkova is probably the most moving character I've ever seen in film. Pure, innocent and simple.Björk's interpretation is just perfect, the atmosphere in the film -with infinite tones of brown, golden yellow and faded green- adds to her dusty, deep voice. Every other character in the movie seems to pledge to underline her authenticity.This is one of the greatest movies I've ever seen.

Ah yes, Dancer in the Dark. I was so thrilled to watch this movie years ago. Hearing so many wonderful things about it, how it's a sad yet beautiful tour de force that will make you shed a few tears, and the fact that the unconventional Von Trier was the mastermind behind the film, I was very excited to watch this. Well, enthusiasm turned to indignation about an hour in. It reminded me of that one friend at house parties would put on Tom Waits to put everyone in a bad mood. The room would get quiet and bleak and my friend would bust out laughing. It was pretty funny, but for Lars to make an adult musical and attempt to make it a visceral tragedy is in poor taste (even for Von Trier). I can't get emotional over a movie's that's completely insincere. The musical-in-the-mind sub-theme of the movie was beautiful. Bjork is a unique personality and a very talented singer and she really shines in the movie and it was cool to see some of her 'headspace' portrayed on screen. The nihilism in the movie, however, was just an overreach in Lars' attempt to get people to shed tears. Kind of tasteless. I was shocked with how much I disliked it after I was blown away by Melancholia: a Von Trier film that I encourage any 'film geek' to check out.

The films of Lars von Trier can be likened to a little boy with a stick. He pokes and prods at incapacitated wild animals, aiming to hurt and bring about squeals of pain, relishing in these reactions and putting off the mercy of death for curiosity's sake. Lars von Trier, of course, is not a little boy, and knows exactly what he is doing and the gravity of his actions. In Dancer in the Dark, his critique takes aim at American escapist musicals where the protagonists can whisk away their worries with a dance and song - in contrast, Selma is harshly jerked out of her percussive daydreams and brought back to reality. Selma is the dumb tortured animal is this scenario, so simple- minded, so incapable of self-pity, and perpetually detached from the life that she leads. So obviously she's a perfect tool for Trier, who blames anyone and everyone for her demise, offering little awareness of any cause and effect, or an escape route. She's a poor Czech immigrant toiling away in America, but that hardly even matters. For the wealth of sociopolitical issues to mine here the setting is made bare of any context. Trier improved on this in Dogville, which at least dropped Nicole Kidman into an allegorical capitalist society where she has to work for room and board. But here Trier wields his characters like dummies to be bashed and bashed for devastation's sake. Selma is offered no agency but continually assaulted by events far beyond her or the film's comprehension. She's little more than a child with initially wide eyes and pixie-ish features; she has a son of her own but no scene to present any notion of maturity, motherhood or devotion towards him, and keeps what little of her earned wages in a candy box like a little girl saving up pocket money. Björk, to her credit, is suitable, making a whole show of gradually squinting and retreating into her songs, but even she can't justify being this delightfully twee and naive in the face of impending doom. It's too easy of a target to shoulder the film's events, and it doesn't earn our sympathies so much as break down sobbing and begging for them. Arresting is one word that has been used to describe Trier's style. Another would be condescending, both towards his characters and audiences. He wields his cameras as if he was part of a hyperactive news crew at the scene of some devastating crime, and you can practically feel the nervy shakiness and excitement at being able to capture and profit from such misery. His clumsy, unstable zooms (that awful final shot of the glasses) intrude on the characters and their emotions, fetishising their fragility in suffocating extreme close- ups. These shots talk down to audiences, as if we could not sympathise unless the camera is thrust right into their faces and the punishment unrepealable. The musical sequences were filmed simultaneously with over a hundred DV cameras, and the drop in quality shows. Although some are inspired, making full use of the inventiveness of Selma's imagination and her child-like glee, floating in and out of reality, they are visually appalling. Perhaps it's Trier's Dogme 95 ties, preventing him from lighting the sequences with anything other than the dim, dusty overhead lights of the factory, rendering all the splashes of imaginary colour in the mise en scène depressingly drab. Or perhaps it's the fact that he continually cuts from dozens of different perspectives of his coverage, without any visible method in the madness but simply because the setup allows him that privilege. If it's supposed to be an attack on Hollywood's fondness with continuity editing it's another black mark for Trier: abrasive for abrasiveness' sake. The Dardenne brothers are a pair of recent filmmakers with similar stylistic goals, and who also focus on the plight of the lower class. But they are not nearly as condescending to their characters as Trier is, who saps Selma of all her dignity and turns her into a prop for an emotional beatdown. In her confrontation with Bill she turns into a hysterical and tragic mess, sobbing and fumbling blindly for the gun but only managing to wound him with the bullets. She then staggers around and finally finishes him off with the deposit box. The sheer absurdity of this scene (why not simply get a head start on the police instead of asking a blind girl to commit murder - and why does she look away and fire blindly instead of feeling for his head and shooting point blank) is coupled with Trier's persistence to lengthen it. He milks and milks the tragedy for all its worth, barreling the camera right into Selma's weeping face, and in the end it becomes hilarious in its ridiculousness. It's unbelievable that no one has turned this into a skit or gag: a lowly, suicidal man asks his friend to pull the trigger, only she's blind and has atrocious aim. He holds it up to his temple for her, she squeezes, and the vase on the shelf six feet to the right explodes. Above all, this is stylised realism, ironic for one of the founders of Dogme 95. He did this in Breaking the Waves too, transferring the film stock onto video and then back again for extra dose of graininess. In this bizarre scene the pair stumble and slip and fall all over the place, setting up additional opportunities for Trier to insert more misery. Just like Haneke gleefully claps his hands every time someone walks out of Funny Games, Trier is lapping up the tears born out of Dancer in the Dark.

Trier is a polemic director who constantly looks only for the shock, but behind the shock there is a message, but sometimes even the message can be "messed up" in some (or most) of his films. Here he delivers a tragic story mostly made for the shock and make the audience cry, and even thought it's a incredibly forced movie, Trier can manage what he wants in some viewers: make them cry. The characters are simple, they have problems (mostly or only of moral, financial and of health), Björk performance is great but her character is too simple (not very well developed). "Dancer in the Dark" is a haunting film, it's incredibly simple and extremely forced, but some how, Trier ended up getting some emotion (even if in a forced way) of the viewer.