Esquire  2000-10

By Elvis Mitchell


"The broken voice that sings the truth"


Bjork Gudmundsdottir curtseys when she introduces herself. This is the 
East Village, the final resting place of middle-class anarchism, and 
people don't typically curtsey here. And when she proffers a hand, and 
it is kissed - a sight probably not glimpsed in Manhattan since Edith 
Wharton packed away her quills and india ink--a streak of crimson passes 
under her eyes. People don't usually blush here, either. But here it is, 
on display, true emotion in an unlikely place, and it's exciting to see 
that with all the other shades on her palette, Bjork is also capable of 
shyness.

From her music, you do know she's capable of enormous waves of feeling; 
she's as distinctive a pop star as exists in today's fairly vanilla 
music culture, and she brings the open soul of an old-fashioned 
chanteuse to her songs - the dizzying give of Billie Holiday caught in
an emotional undertow--as well as a defiant bark.

And when she speaks, softly rolling her r's in her Icelandic accent, 
it's very nearly as if she's singing. She's talking about the movie she 
has made, Dancer in the Dark, a film that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 
and for which Bjork was awarded Best Actress, and she's saying that 
acting, an experience of "profound cruelty," is something that she'll 
never do again. It seems that Bjork and the director, Lars yon Trier, 
did not get along. Von Trier, famous for forcing his actors not to act 
so much as "feel," met his match in Bjork, who does nothing but feel 
anyway, and so the director's treatment began to seem gratuitous, like 
something that is prohibited under the Geneva Convention. Along the way, 
Catherine Deneuve, who is also in the film, turned to her and said, 
"Don't you love to pretend to be someone else?" And Bjork answered, "No, 
I don't."

In the film, she plays Selma, a factory worker somewhere in America who, 
in times of trouble, gathers the factory noises together in her head and 
makes them into music, and suddenly she is transported, the star of an 
elaborate industrial production number, a rust-belt Ginger Rogers.

The songs for the film, which Bjork wrote, were another battleground 
between her and yon Trier. She is thinking of the experience, and her 
warm, caramel eyes go cold. And her face-pale, with its exaggerated 
upswept lashes and wide, almond eyes, resembling a Western girl drawn by 
the anime master Hayao Miyazaki for one of his epic Japanese cartoons-
loses its luminous bloom.

"I felt Selma was a very poetic creature," she says. "For Lars, being 
poetic means being intellectual. It means educated - it means snob. For 
me, it doesn't. You can be working class, you can never have read a book 
in your whole life. I think you can be dressed in a pink feather boa and 
still be speaking the truth. I fought quite hard for Selma in the 
lyrics: The time it takes a tear to fall, a rose to grow a thorn, is the 
time it will take for you to forgive me. I would say that's quite naive, 
but poetic and passionate and romantic. Afterward, talking to Lars, he 
was happy I defended the songs."

Besides the conviction never to do it again, did she learn anything from 
the ordeal?

Bjork bursts into laughter. "I can tell you what I learned in another 
five years." She pauses. "I think I found I didn't know I cared so much 
about what I do. I learned that I would stick to my principles no matter 
what. And I wouldn't have thought of myself as a religious person before 
that. I was more of an atheist. In Iceland, we believe in nature. 
There's no religion. But now I feel religious, not in a classical sense, 
like a sect or Christianity or Islam. But that my music is literally my 
temple, and don't come in here in your filthy shoes."