Consolations of the Musical.

• Author: SHARRETT, CHRISTOPHER
• Position: Review

THE MUSICAL has never been my favorite film genre. I was never taken by the idea of the fabric of drama suddenly ripped asunder as people break into song, affirming the goodness of life even as it seems to stink for the moment. This sounds a little glib and creel, but it more or less sums up, I think, what the musical has been about since its inception in the sound era (and, without a doubt, the musical was the biggest sales tool for sound movies).

There seems no irony that the musical begins in earnest with the Great Depression, with "Footlight Parade" and "Gold Diggers of 1935" being Hollywood's assurance to the public that life can be a bowl of cherries. In the postwar period, the musical reached epic proportions with "Kismet," "South Pacific," "Oklahoma," "The Music Man," and "The Sound of Music." Each seemed an expression less of its own vapid storyline than of the triumph of escapism.

Lars Van Trier's "Dancer in the Dark" at first seems to share my grave doubts about the genre, since it starts off as something like a deconstructionist essay on the musical and its cultural legacy. The action takes place in an exceptionally bleak early-1960s America, photographed in a washed-out sepia, with cars and other iconography suggesting an even earlier nation of hard work, repression, and despair.

A young immigrant named Selma (Icelandic pop star Bjork in her first--and, she maintains, only--role) and her young son survive in a less-than-friendly small town. She and her friend Kathy (Catherine Deneuve, beautiful even when frumpy) work at a grinding job in a sheet metal factory, where Selma can hardly keep up with the demands of the assembly line. To top it off, Selma is rapidly going blind. She saves every dime in a cigar box in order to provide medical care for her young son, who is stricken by the same genetic ailment caking his mother's sight. A local cop, Selma's mentor and confidant, suddenly turns vicious as his own financial woes turn him toward Selma's savings. Things go from worse to much worse, as Selma finds herself charged for a murder not really her doing. Her trial resembles the Salem Witch Hunts combined with the McCarthy hearings. It takes little prescience to figure that she will be convicted, with the trial even exposing the fact that Selma came from a "communist" country. Selma is sentenced to hang, and the final reel takes viewers through her grueling experience of the minutia of death row.

Yes, this is a musical, although...