Dancer in the Dark

This is one movie which took me completely unawares, all my guards down. I completely forgot I was watching a movie. As a rule I never forget that, even if the subject appeals to me , there is a part of my brain which sits back stone-faced and slices and dices the stuff on the screen, toys with it wondering where to place it.

The movie walked around me like a person, a person who draws you unto them with their never seen before openness, everything, every gesture is just right, you just take the hand which is offered to you without a question and start walking the trail they walk, forgetting for those few minutes who you are, what you are. I forgot the fact that I am just a person sitting in a chair watching the goings on of the screen, surrounded by strangers in a cinephiles club.

I feel a little weird admitting it. I know the movie was very different than any movie I had seen till date, in a lot of ways. But what was the diferentest was the way I reacted, I thought I didn’t know myself that day, I didn’t know I was so pliable, so touchy. And I am so scared to admit my opinion of it, because this one crossed the lines of being another film with the revelations it brought alongside.

The strangest thing of is all the way I was that day, the way I reacted, the way I felt muted after the movie, the deep dull weight in my head and in my chest , how when I was finally in bed again the thought of wretched poverty would get me crying again.
First of all, tears started streaming down my face somewhere mid-way through the movie. Ok my eyes do get little moist once in a while when watching a movie. But this was strange, they seemed to be streaming down as if a sudden excess of fluid had been detected in my body and had to be urgently released. But generally in every movie there are one or two such phases. But bro this movie was nothing of phases it was one helluva experience, they rocked, the filmmakers shook me up, till I forgot all restraints and was crying openly I was beyond all sense of control. Here I was sitting among strangers, by the end I had stopped wiping my face, and in the last few minutes I almost crumbled into me, and was very aware of an unknown pressing ache in my chest, I thought it was because of the uncomfortable chairs, but later I realized it was nothing but weight of the sadness thrown off the screen.

Spoiler- plot give away follows ........
The movie is heartbreaking. It transports you to this forsaken land of innocence.
Selma (Björk) is this naive, honest factory worker, who is saving money scrupulously for her son’s eye surgery to save him from falling prey to impending blindness, which has already advanced upon her as she moves to middle age. Everyday when she steps out of work there you find Jeff waiting for her hoping she would accept his offer of a lift back home. With time her blindness becomes apparent to those close to her, and their concern for her rises to anxiety, but Selma smilingly casts aside their worries and admits to have no need for eyes anymore, she has seen all she ever wanted. A beautiful song ensues where Jeff is telling what all is left to see, where Selma is happy simply recounting all she has come to see.

Though the movie is not a feel-good candy floss even from the beginning, what with Selma and her kids life in a foreign land, her saving money, her kid’s running away from school every now and then, and her foggy sight. But, there is this pure warmth that one feels for some time in the beginning, which is lost as Selma’s naiveté is cruelly punished for by the neighbor and the owner of her trailer, when she confides in him about her illness and the fact that she is saving money to protect her kid from the same sickness. And what hurts the more is because she did this just to ease him of his debt-related worries.

Bill is brilliantly acted out by David Morse. I loved this character so much because there is a lot of ambiguity in defining it just they way you can never really pen down a person as one discrete entity. I love the way Bill is shown as this usual nice caring husband, friendly neighbour, generous landowner. But once he learns of Selma’s stashed away fortune and her near-blind eyesight how he stands in a corner one day to learn the place where she keeps her money and eventually takes it. The character Bill before resorting to stealing also tries to emotionally coax her into giving him the money, by offer of quick return, by telling her that he has been thinking of killing himself. Even in the sequence of last struggle between these two before he dies, I was not sure whether some part of him is actually resorting to death as an escape to this problem, as well as hoping that her blindness might fool her into giving up, thinking he has been hurt.

It’s a story told with a purity of unbiased unopinionated view. It made me a child again, how I would read a story and be swept into the world opened up before me, unwarily, how my happiness would depend on how happy everybody in the story ends up.

Recently i came upon this review of Dancer in the Dark, and i think this one says it so much better and echoes what all i couldnt express but agree with.

Here: