Dancer in the Dark
Ah, Dancer in the Dark. With a delay of four years, I have finally watched it XD Back then, I seriously feared to be not emotionally stable enough to watch it, but I guess I worried for nothing: The film was sad, but it was not as depressing as One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was (to me, at least).
My very first impression of the film might be a little bit unusual: I have known the cover of the film for ages already; and as you all know, the cover is pretty dark and gray with a little blueish tinge. In consequence, I somehow expected the film itself to be rather dark (similarily to “Wait until dark”) and rather blue/green than yellow. That’s it: The whole film looked so incredibly beige to me XD The walls of the houses and buildings, the ground, the not-so-green nature, the gray factory. Maybe I was just biased and had weird expectations (similarily to this article) XD However, the yellowness of the colour scheme matches the film very well – if I had to associate ‘society’ with a colour, it would be beige.
In my opinion, the weirdest point of the film is actually the appearance Catherine Deneuve. I mean, oh my god, La Deneuve just looks so weird as a factory worker with a headscarf. Technically, she was great in that role, but it just does not match!
By the way, she was so funny when she made the dog barking sounds though *hehehe*
Have I ever mentioned that I dislike musical films? I found “My Fair Lady” and “Moulin Rouge” quite dreadful and there is nothing worse than Grease, West Side Story and all that crap; on the other hand, there is a handful of musical films I like (“Singin’ in the Rain” and “Chicago” for instance). In this case however, I liked the musical inserts even though I did not really like the songs themselves – they were all very well done and did not have this ridiculousness of other musical songs. I also would not call this an anti-musical film because it does not parodize musicals, but is rather an hommage to musicals (“anti” always has this fiendish connotation for me).
And of course, without the songs, the ending would not have been so great. I was quite shocked by that scene – not in the “wah she’s dead” emotional kind of way though; actually I rather thought: “Oh wow, the script is so great!”
The point where I was nearly moved to tears was the scene before, when Kathy runs over and puts her son’s glasses into Selma’s hands while she cried and shivered. I found that really touching, and at the same time relieving because we get to know that her son (most probably) really got cured and that she had not died for nothing. This is also the reason why “Dancer in the Dark” did not left me sad in the end, because at the end of the day, she actually got what she wanted even though she paid with her life.
PS. About the title of the post: I can’t quite believe that “Dancer in the Dark” and “Idiots” are supposed to be a trilogy with “Breaking the Waves”. Since I have not seen “Breaking the Waves”, I can’t say anything (but I believe it works well with “Dancer in the Dark”), but how does “Idiots” fit in? Ah well…
Dancer in the Dark is, like, a variation on “Breaking the Waves”. It’s all about the excessive suffering of a woman? I guess Karen was meant to be like Selma and Bess, though she’s nowhere as dominant in Idiots, as Selma and Bess are in their respective films (the latter two, essentially, carry their films almost single-handedly).