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Painfully good

May 18, 2000

BY ROGER EBERT 

CANNES, France--Films are booed at Cannes for two reasons: Because they are
bad, or because they are infuriating. Those in the second category are likely to be
quite good, although they make you so mad, you have to step back and cool off to
appreciate their qualities.

Consider "Dancer in the Dark," the new film by Danish rebel Lars von Trier. It is the
most debated film at Cannes this year, and it was roundly booed at its first screening
Wednesday morning. Does that make it bad? No. Will it drive you nuts? Without
question.

The film is set in America and filmed in English, on locations suggesting a Southern
factory town in the 1950s. But two of the leading characters are Europeans; rock
singer Bjork plays the lead, a young mother who operates a punch press, even
though she is going blind. Catherine Deneuve, usually seen in elegant roles, plays her
best friend, and is quite effective, albeit as the most beautiful punch-press operator in
movie history.

Von Trier is one of the authors of Dogma 95, the cinematic vow of chastity. True to
its tenets, "Dancer in the Dark" includes vertiginous photography with a hand-held
camera that swishes back and forth from one actor to another like a home movie.
Then the drab video look is replaced on several occasions by a more saturated film
look, as the movie bursts into song with musical numbers set on a railroad bridge,
the factory floor and even Death Row.

Yes, the Bjork character goes to prison, in a plot which seems lifted directly from
the broadest silent melodrama. She saves money to pay for an operation that will
prevent her son from also going blind, and after many complications, there is the first
trial sequence I have ever seen in which the defense attorney says not one word.

Scarcely a moment in the movie is believable on a realistic level, but it contains great
emotional truth. Scarcely a shot does not distract from its content, and yet somehow
the content gathers force. The style is maddening, and yet a conventional "well
made" movie could not have the same effect. I wanted to applaud and boo at the
same time. That is a compliment.

It also is a compliment to his film that "Dancing in the Dark" kept me awake every
single second, since I had attended the 12:30 a.m. screening of Darren Aronofsky's
"Requiem for a Dream," got to sleep at 3 a.m. and had to get up again at 7 to attend
the von Trier. (The festival is a sleep-deprivation marathon that turns into a requiem
for everyone's dreams.)

The Aronofsky film is a favorite of the midnight-screening crowd, although I found it
less challenging than his brilliant first work, "Pi." It stars Jared Leto, Jennifer
Connelly and Marlon Wayans as young heroin addicts, and has one of the festival's
best performances by Ellen Burstyn, as Leto's mother. The downward spiral into
addiction has been seen before, but the movie's style is riveting.

Willem Dafoe creates another of the festival's most memorable performances in
"Shadow of a Vampire," a film by E. Elias Merhige about the making of F.W.
Murnau's silent classic "Nosferatu" (1923). That film, which essentially gave birth to
the vampire film genre, was centered on a profoundly creepy performance by Max
Schreck as the vampire. In the new film, we learn that Schreck was not a Method
actor but, in fact, actually a vampire.

"Tabou," by the Japanese master Nagisa Oshima, is set in 1865, inside the camp of
a samurai militia unit thrown into upheaval by the recruitment of an extraordinarily
beautiful boy as a new warrior. The samurai chief of staff (played by Japanese
director Takeshi Kitano) observes that even his superior is stirred by the boy's
appearance, and muses "he does not lean that way." Many of the samurai do, but
this is not a "gay film." Instead, it's an unfolding mystery with suspense and dry wit.
(The festival joke is that the U.S. title should be "Not to Ask, Not to Tell.")

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