Score queen

Björk's soundtrack to Dancer in the Dark redefines the borders of irony

by Richard C. Walls

It's not difficult to figure out why Lars von Trier's just released Dancer in the Dark is such a polarizing film. Much of it is shot in what could be called enhanced Dogma 95, with grainy textures and drained colors, a swerving handheld camera and seemingly random jump cuts.

Now and then, as it slides into a musical number featuring lead actress Björk, the colors brighten and the shots become more traditionally composed. Detractors have a lot to harp on -- if the mise-en-scène doesn't make you physically ill, there's always the bizarre casting to scoff at and the brazenly melodramatic plot to feel superior to. You'll need an odd mix of detachment and susceptibility to appreciate the audacity of Trier's postmodern primitivism while at the same time letting the lushly sad songs pierce your hard-won veneer of sophistication. Personally, I thought it was brilliant.

The new Björk EP, Selmasongs (Elektra), is the musical soundtrack from the movie, taking up 32 minutes of the film's 140-minute running time. The disc, like the film, begins with an instrumental overture written by Björk and orchestrated by Vincent Mendoza. In the movie, it plays over a slide show of brightly colored abstractions, an apparent homage to West Side Story, but heard without the visuals it's more reminiscent of another Bernstein score, the one he did for On the Waterfront. It centers on a simple but slightly pained-sounding seven-note theme played on French horns that rises out of an ominous drone like dubious hope emerging from permanent despair (and pish-tosh to those who say there are no hummable songs here -- I haven't been able to get that theme out of my head for a week).

The set-up for the musical numbers is that Björk's Selma -- who's going blind, as is her son -- is given to escapist reveries that are triggered by the natural rhythms she hears and that take the form of the type of production numbers found in the musicals she adores. That might sound cheesy, but just factor in Trier's hyper-realism (you have to see it) and Björk, of whom I've never been a big fan but whose combination of unforced naïveté and passion fits in perfectly here. The first number, "Cvalda," takes place in the sheet-metal plant, where Selma tends to space out even on non-musical days. The monotonously repetitious stamp and wheeze of the machines become a techno-underpinning for the normally shy worker's first ecstatic fantasy outburst (the lyrics to this dense song can be accessed at www.björk.com).

"I've Seen It All," which grows out of the clacking of a passing train, is a duet between Selma and her frustrated suitor, Jeff (Peter Stormare, who was Steve Buscemi's goonish sidekick in Fargo). As if it weren't strange enough to see Stormare's hulking dimwit crooning a ballad, his singing is dubbed by the eternally discontented Thom Yorke of Radiohead. The song is meant to demonstrate Selma's resignation to her encroaching blindness, but its sad grandeur (Mendoza again) and those sudden emotional leaps (a Björk specialty) give the lie to the brave-face lyrics.

Björk's passion also saves "Scatterheart," a song Selma addresses to her son, from mawkishness. Actually, this number goes to the film's melodramatic heart -- which is one of its stickiest points. If Trier is the supreme ironist, then the melodrama here must be of the wink-wink variety. Yet when Björk, after singing about how her son is going to have a hard life that she can do nothing to prevent, belts out, "You are gonna have to find out for yourself," no scrim of insincerity is discernible to save us from the rawness. It just plain hurts.

"In the Musicals," then, is a brief respite from all this knotty grimness, though it's also the most self-deluding number and has a truly nasty piece of foreshadowing when Selma sings of the musicals that "you were always there to catch me/When I fall . . . " The circumstances of the closer song, "New World," shouldn't be described to someone who hasn't seen the film -- suffice to say that Trier goes too far, which is one of the reasons it's so devastating. The melody here is that of the plaintive overture. The lyrics begin in a dadaist mode -- "Train whistles, a sweet clementine/Blueberries, dancers in line/Cobwebs, a bakery sign" -- but soon get to the point: "If living is seeing/I'm holding my breath/In wonder -- I wonder/What happens next?" And then . . . nothing.