http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/17/arts/17POWE.html New York Times 2000-09-17 By Ann Powers "Making a Tragedy With a Happy Ending" BJORK GUDMUNDSDOTTIR hopes that people realize that "Dancer in the Dark" is not a tragedy. Despite this Icelandic singer's blood- and-guts- spilling performance in the role of Selma, which won this year's best- actress award at Cannes, Bjork says the film's final vision is of one of her favorite spiritual states: joy. "We always thought that this was a film with a happy ending," Bjork said in an interview recently. "For sure. That's one aspect of what the film is trying to say: when the need for something brilliant is so great, you can create it with the human spirit alone. And it isn't artificial. It's real." "Dancer in the Dark," chosen to open the New York Film Festival on Friday, is positively Greek in its fatalism. The route it takes to its transcendental outcome costs Selma as much as the most devastated queen of a Douglas Sirk melodrama ever endured. Selma is a Czech immigrant factory worker in the Pacific Northwest, a good woman who is losing her sight and who resorts to desperate measures to save her son from the same fate. But magic bursts through the surface of this unhappy tale, in the grand song-and-dance numbers Selma stages in her mind. Reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht's theater of alienation and Dennis Potter's post-modern musicals, "Dancer in the Dark" is a musical about the battle music wages for the soul's transformation amid the din of life. "That was, in a way, the duality of the film," Bjork said. "Reality versus fantasy, film versus music, male versus female, it could go on forever. And only at one point do these elements unite." She was speaking of the film's devastating end. Selma triumphs, on her own terms, by finding the strength to be euphoric. The quest for that feeling is one Bjork knows well. In her three solo albums, mixing the folk styles of her native country with symphonic structures and ultra-modern electronic music, Bjork has found sonic expression for the clash between rules and emotions, between the body's limits and the mind's wild ride. The challenges she sets herself have made her one controversial diva, the pop equivalent to "Dancer in the Dark's" revered and scorned director, Lars von Trier. The union of these two insurgents has provoked intense reaction. Booed at the Cannes International Film Festival this spring, the film went on to win the festival's top prize. Its Website (www.dancerinthedarkmovie.com), sponsored by the Fine Line film company, opens with the phrases "Love It" and "Hate It," along with blurbs from critics reflecting both responses. Entertainment Weekly called it "a triumph of form, content and artistic integrity." Variety condemned it as "artistically bankrupt on every level." Bjork is accustomed to slaps and kisses like this. What bothers her is the gossip circulating about the struggles - the tantrums, the flights from the set, the rending of garments! - between herself and Mr. von Trier during filming. That is why she is fielding questions, something she hates to do. But here she is, wearing a a slightly stained Chinese pink silk dress in a penthouse suite at the Soho Grand hotel, explaining herself. "I put three years of my life into this, and people are just kind of walking in there with dirty shoes," Bjork said of the way the work is being obscured by tales of bad behavior. "But I'm a defender of the need for a haven in which to create. I'm sorry, Lars could sit here next to me and we could say it was tough, but we were just doing what the roles demanded." Confrontation was exactly what Mr. von Trier wanted, Bjork said. "He already was an ambassador for his own universe," she explained. "Law and order, Dogma" - the back-to-basics filmmaking collective he founded in 1995 - "the policeman. He needed someone to represent the other half. When we started to work on this project, 50 percent of everything was sitting there waiting for me." At times Bjork did not want to be Mr. von Trier's female alter ego on the set. Originally she agreed only to compose the film's music, but she grew attached to Selma's story and was persuaded by the director to take on the role. Their collaboration was explosive, but she ultimately kept her commitment to do what she had been asked. "When I was in Iceland working on the film score, Lars sent me a pink silk cushion, like really big, embroidered in Icelandic," she recalled. "It said, 'I promise to always say how I feel about everything, because otherwise Lars will manipulate me.' " Sticking to the film's emotional fever pitch demanded discipline. Untrained as an actress, and with only one small film role to her credit (as a good witch in the 1987 film "The Juniper Tree"), Bjork took a more instinctive approach to interpreting Selma. She immersed herself in the part, to the point where it sometimes worried her friends. Her fellow cast members offered support, especially Catherine Deneuve, whose encouragement mirrored her film role as Cathy, Selma's co-worker and strong best friend. For all involved, Bjork's process was painful to watch. "She was naïve and not able to undress herself from the part at the end of the day," said Vincent Paterson, the film's dance director and choreographer, who also plays Samuel, Selma's director in an endearingly amateurish community production of "The Sound of Music." "The slapping Gene scene" - in which Selma punishes her son - "took her two days," Mr. Paterson continued. "At one point she asked if could have a stand- in do it. And the killing scene was overwhelmingly cathartic and distastrous. We had to party hard during that time to just get drunk and have her free herself from it." Yet the trauma Bjork went through enacting Selma's murder of Bill, the treacherous friend played by David Morse, offered an artistic breakthrough. She reacted completely differently from what Mr. von Trier expected, emanating compassion instead of rage. "I was supposed to go really angry, run upstairs and kill him," said Bjork of the scene where Selma attacks Bill for stealing her paltry life savings. "For me that was just not Selma at all. The first thing that came into my mind is: poor guy, is he that desperate, has he gone that far down the line?" Mr. von Trier well knew that Bjork was capable of summoning motherly fury, because of a much-reported 1996 fracas in which she struck a journalist trying to interview her son Sindri, now 14, in a Bangkok airport.. But the director got lucky when Bjork exhibited the pathos that makes the scene brilliant. "It was sort of the lioness defending the lion cub," she said of the Bangkok incident. "And of course losing complete control and crossing all lines. But Lars talked quite a lot about that. I think that's one of the reasons he offered me the job. Because you're seeing a person who would never ever hit anyone in their life, so it takes so much to make them violent. So when they do, everything just explodes." The brutality that runs throughout "Dancer in the Dark" is intensified by the exuberant musical numbers that burst forth every time the plot is about to take a downturn. They operate the way ecstasy works throughout Bjork's music, as an urgent antidote. "Sometimes the worse things get, the need to be happy is so big that the songs become happier," she said. "The times when I wasn't so happy, I would have the fiercest highs. And then when I am overall satisfied, the peaks are not so sharp." The musical numbers in "Dancer in the Dark" free Selma, but not necessarily the viewer. Several factors establish a paradoxical mix of precision and rawness. One hundred cameras, offering myriad cuts and angles, created a live feeling. Mr. Paterson also clung to the real world in his choreography, encouraging his dancers to move spontaneously, as if they were regular people thrust onto the stage of Selma's visions. "I attacked it all from Selma's perspective," said Mr. Paterson, whose portfolio includes Madonna's "Blond Ambition" tour and the videos for Michael Jackson's "Bad" and "Smooth Criminal." "If a lay person were to choreograph this, what would they do? I didn't tell everyone to turn to the left or the right at the same time, so you got the sense that everything is choreographed, but pedestrian, in a sense. I felt it was essential that Selma find a haven in these sequences, but also that it was still her real life." The link between Selma's musical flights and her life is also embedded in the songs themselves. Each begins with rhythms taken from the environment - the whirr of the machines at the factory where Selma works, the scratching of a sketch artist's pencil in the courtroom, the clang of the train passing by when Selma's lovestruck suitor, Jeff (Peter Stormare), realizes she is going blind. "We'd have 110 tracks in every song, the orchestra being big and then all the little noises," Bjork said. "We'd make a drumbeat out of 20 different noises." It was a challenge for Bjork to write with each scene's environment in mind, rather than simply tuning in to her internal soundscape. She also found it humbling to compose for other voices. This focus beyond her own ego became complete when she took on the role of Selma. That self- negation is what she sought from the project: she immersed herself in Selma the way Selma surrenders to fate. "I'd just done three albums that were about me," she said. "At that point in my life, I was willing to give myself up to something. Being selfish would have felt wrong." But Bjork is a powerful guardian of her art, and even in sacrifice she demanded control. The first compromise she required was that Mr. von Trier write the lyrics for the songs with her lifelong friend and sometime collaborator, the Icelandic poet Sjon Sigurdsson. "I felt that Selma has got a lot of poetry in her," said Bjork. "Lars wanted the lyrics to be more like, 'pass me the salt' and 'call the police.' Which is fair enough, that's his strength, but I also felt it could be that elevated state of poetry. So Sjon provided that." Bjork gets the final word on Selma's self-expression on "Selmasongs," the companion album to "Dancer in the Dark." Although most of the recordings come directly from the film, Bjork has made a few significant changes. Her partner in the duet "I've Seen it All," whose grand simplicity is, according to Bjork, her proudest accomplishment, is not the grunt-voiced Mr. Stormare, but the dulcet Thom Yorke of Radiohead. And "Scatterheart," which in the film is the song that guides Selma after the murder, becomes a love letter to her son written after the film's final frame. "For Selma, her ears stood for fantasy," said Bjork. "So I decided it would be more complete if the record was just how she would like things to be, not how they are. It wouldn't have been right to repeat the film experience. It would be more true to Selma to have it be her dream come true." Bjork's own dreams have been unsettled since playing Selma, and she is ready to put the part behind her. Her well-publicized protestations that this will be her last film make it seem as if she is angry, but in fact she is just worn out, she said.. She said she misses the joy she gets from simply singing. The album she is now completing, tentatively entitled "Domestica," reflects that longing, she said. It's the negative of the film, or should I say the positive?" she laughed, discussing her new songs. "I would come home after 14 hours of crying and nervous breakdowns, and just make these euphoric little silk scarves that were kind of luminous and full of hope. But very fragile, because obviously I was frail. And sort of humorous, because that's something the film doesn't have a lot of." Bjork is not sure whether she will perform the music from "Selmasongs" when she tours next year. She will find out when she gets there: "That's what happens when you do your work through emotions," said Bjork. "It's not calculated. You are always going blindfolded into new territories. But I've got a feeling this whole feeling of Selma will finally complete once I've finished my new album." With no regrets, Bjork is ready to go back to feeling Bjork.