I keep telling myself this is going to get better. That I’m going to watch one of these movies and just have a grand old time. I’ll find a new favorite. I’ll hum a song for a few days. But then I watched Dancer in the Dark and now I’m honestly debating if I want to keep going with this project. I had to pause the movie several times and walk away, because it got too hard to watch. This movie is like if a depressed person made the musical Chicago, and instead of fighting for her life, Roxie puts up no defense and gets executed at the end.
Picture it – Washington State, 1964: Selma is a Czechoslovakian immigrant who lives in a trailer with her 12-year-old son Gene. Selma has a genetic degenerative eye disease that will eventually cause her to go blind. Her son also has this, so Selma works at a factory and does a series of odd jobs to save money so her son can get eye surgery and be spared the same fate. When life feels too hard, or Selma wants to escape, she retreats to her mind, where every situation is performed like a scene from a musical.
Bill, her landlord/cop friend, is in debt. Instead of telling his wife so she will stop spending so much money, he makes the mature decision to threaten suicide in front of Selma. When this doesn’t elicit the response he desires, Bill steals Gene’s eye surgery money while Selma is at work. When she confronts him about it, he pretends that she stole his gun out of his desk drawer and is trying to rob him. His wife hears the commotion and runs to a neighbors house to call for help, even though they are in their home, and presumably have a phone? While she’s gone, Bill pleads for Selma to murder him, and if she does, she’ll get her money back. Selma then shoots Bill several times, but because she is blind, he doesn’t immediately die. She then takes a bank deposit box and beats him over the head with it. After Bill is good and dead, Selma leaves his house and has her friend Jeff drive her to the eye doctor so she can pay for Gene’s eye surgery.
Selma then gets arrested and does nothing to clear her guilt. She tells a jury Bill asked her to kill him, and when asked why Bill wanted to die, she says she can’t tell because she promised Bill she wouldn’t. When asked where she got the money she was claiming Bill stole, she lied and said she was saving it for her fictitious father. She does this because she doesn’t want the cops to find out about where the money went and risk Gene not being able to get this magic surgery. Selma is, unsurprisingly, convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
These series of events are rehashed immediately afterward, when her friends Kathy and Bill find out where the money went, take it back from the eye doctor, and use it to pay for a lawyer to reopen her case. Selma figures this out and refuses the help (because that money needs to be used on Gene’s eye surgery!), condemning her to death once again. This is what happens when you don’t have free health care in this country. You choose between paying for your son’s eye surgery or hanging to death.
There’s only a few scenes between Selma and Gene where they interact with each other – they’re all at the beginning of the movie and Gene acts like an uncaring brat the entire time. The rest of the movie he’s either asleep or absent, but the audience is supposed to care about their relationship? We’re supposed to believe that Selma would sacrifice her own life, twice, so Gene can see?
No, we’re supposed to feel bad for Selma. That’s it. Every character exists to protect Selma, every scene exists to make her more sympathetic. The entire movie’s goal is to make the viewer as attached to Selma as possible in order to make the ending that much more tragic.
Sometimes writers give the game away, so to speak, for where the initial idea for a project came from, just based on how much care is placed into a specific scene. It could be longer, or more detailed, or have a few really fantastic, overwritten sentences. I would bet a million dollars that Lars von Trier had the visual of a wronged, helpless woman, belting out her swan song before plummeting below the gallows. That is the only reason this movie exists, as some sort of misery porn. In this aspect, it did succeed, just based on the number of gifs that exist of Selma’s hanging.
So, right, this was a musical. The songs are tonally appropriate, and beautifully cinematic – they’re written by Bjork, so that’s par for the course. The lyrics unfortunately knock them down several pegs. Everyone except Bjork is talking at very strange rhythms, while she’s singing her heart out. I would have really liked to see the choreography and how the scenes were blocked, but this movie was shot by a director who doesn’t seem to like or appreciate musicals, so we get quick jump-cut messes like the one below:
This movie was shot with a handheld camera, I’m assuming to make things feel more intimate, but to me it had the opposite effect. It gives the impression someone is always there watching everything unfold. There was a vicarious bystander effect while I was watching Selma persuaded to kill a guy. The musical numbers, in contrast, are shot with hundreds of still cameras, so each performance only had to be run through a few times. They’re Selma’s own illusions, but they are filmed in the most realistic way possible. I would say it’s equivalent to watching a youtube clip of a flash mob.
The only reason this movie isn’t a flaming dumpster fire is because of Bjork. She is adorable, and I think she did a great job in portraying the character she had, however implausible Selma might have been.
…Holy shit, it just occurred to me that Bjork was dressed as a swan at the academy awards one year. Was it for this movie?!… IT WAS FOR THIS MOVIE. How come nobody make that connection, did nobody see it?! SHE SINGS A LITERAL SWAN SONG WHY DID EVERYONE THINK THE DRESS WAS SO WEIRD? Bjork, literal icon, underrated queen.
Thank god Purple Rain is next, because I know exactly what I’m getting there and it’s delicious.
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