Dancer in the Dark (2000)

            Von Trier seems incapable of not pushing the modern movie making boundaries in any film he does.  The intoxicating carnality of Antichrist is a testament to his depression.  The Five Obstructions has him literally forcing another filmmaker to experiment.  And his co-creation of Dogme 95 is only the beginning.  So the fact that he employed over 100 cameras for his 2000 musical was just another notch on his belt.

            Bjork stars as an immigrant working a dangerous factory job with deteriorating eyesight to pay for an operation so her son doesn't follow in her footsteps.  She also has a love for musicals where the characters break out into song for no apparent reason and plot elements are satisfactorily concluded, at least for their characters.  In this film, the musical numbers are set within the construct of the mind, and in their conclusion, we return to the unchanged diegetic world and nothing has been resolved to the benefit of the protagonist.  Rather, it was just a bunch of singing and dancing existing entirely as escapist fare.

        It was von Trier’s attempt to shoot this musical numbers, with the 100 customized Cinemascope-ish lenses, as a live event.  With this number of cameras running the event would only have to happen once and could be cut in real time.  DVD interviews show von Trier displeased with the failure of his experiment.  The rest of the film is not representative of the failure von Trier talks about.  The harsh elements Bjork encounters only expand to the point of no return.  Von Trier makes the point clear that in his musical, singing and dancing will not overturn the narrative course of events and that even such usually good-natured fun can end sour.

            It is another case of von Trier pushing his female leads to the extreme and on-set relations between the two are notoriously strained.  The film strays from the usual cheery lighting of commercial musicals thus grounding the film a bit further in reality.  In fact, it would be safer to not to call it a musical but rather a dramatic and depressing narrative with self-mocking musical interludes.