Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Dancer in the Dark

17:20 / 07.11.01

Holy shit.

18:28 / 07.11.01

Yep. Nasty little ending, huh?

22:33 / 07.11.01

I took my mum to see this.

For her birthday.

It was her request - "Oh, I heard it was good, and I like Catherine Deneuve..."

At the end she had tears streaming down her face and I felt like someone had kicked me in the gut.

Happy Birthday, mum!

Brigade du jour

21:30 / 29.01.05

Yeah, not a great birthday movie! I know how both of you felt, though, cried like a big baby right through the ending credits. I think it was the song 'New World' that did it, because I already loved that song and found it very moving.

Okay, let me do something very unprofessional here and refer to something without any kind of link or evidence - I'm sure I read somewhere (in fact, now I come to think of it, it may even have been on Barbelith) that Lars von Trier himself thought of this film (and perhaps some of his other very 'sad' and 'serious' films like it) as a comedy, or maybe a very pointed satire.

Does anybody else remember this? Agree? Disagree? Wish to express great anger at being duped by an emotionally crippled charlatan, perhaps?

16:28 / 30.01.05

I'm not a big fan of Dancer in the Dark, and even less so after seeing Dogville, which I thought was brilliant. In Dancer, we see the Bjork go through all this awful stuff, and take so much crap, and then she gets killed. She only suffers, she's not really a character.

DOGVILLE SPOILERS AHEAD

It's the equivalent of if at the end of Dogville, the villagers just killed Grace. It might be an appropriate end to the story, but it lacks the complexity of the actual Dogville ending. The ending of Dogivlle redeems all of Grace's suffering, because it shows how it has changed her, and turned her into someone who's at least as bad as the people who tortured her. Bjork in Dancer never does this, she just suffers and dies.

Plus, that kid was completely underdeveloped and was just a plot device. Though, I will say I liked parts of it, like the song on the train, and the song in the factory.