With "Dancer in the Dark" Lars von Trier confirms his tendency to cheat the audience by involving it in a cruel game. In this case the game consists in doing everything to make the viewer identify him/herself in Selma's character; so He shows her as the most harmless, excessively generous and implausibly naïve person in the world: a sort of a child-woman who hides her money in a cookies-box, someone which is impossible not to have sympathy for. Then He subjects Selma to a contrived series of physical and psychological tortures which, because of the identification process between character and viewer, is inflicted to the audience too. This way the director achieves his only aim: have the viewers crying after taking them on the verge of a nervous breakdown. One of the negative notes of this movie is the balance of characters: after "Breaking the Waves" Lars von Trier has been accused of misogyny and knowing that also The Dancer could be liable of the same remark, because of the very similar childish, tormented female main character, He surrounded Selma with a series of male characters who are almost all nasty and negative and He interspersed the script, especially toward the finale, with a lot of references to sorority and female bonding. For these reasons I invite IMDb commentators who claimed this film as a masterpiece to reconsider their judgment and think about it with more detachment: in fact the director's seemingly succeeded attempt was to talk only to viewer's heart cutting out the brain. Finally two requests: don't take The Dancer as film against death penalty and the American way of life because those issues here are merely functional to the heroine's martyrdom; but above all don't ever compare Lars von Trier to C.T. Dreyer: They don't have anything in common but the fact that They're both Danes and The Dancer resembles more to Arthur Hiller's "Love Story" than to "The Passion of Joan of Arc". I give it 6/10 just for its technical merits and the indubitable effectiveness.
Review of Dancer in the Dark
