Valuable alone for the furor caused among movie lovers after winning the Palme d’Or at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival – some saw it as revolutionary cinema, others as manipulative pap – Danish director Lars von Trier’s invigorating curiosity transplants the grand emotions of musical theater into our voyeuristic digital age. Pop star
Bjork is mesmerizing as a downtrodden single mother in 1960s Washington who escapes her troubles, including encroaching blindness, by imagining herself in lavish musical numbers – scenes reportedly shot by von Trier using more than 100 digital video cameras. There’s joy and sorrow throughout here, right down to the shocking end; consider the entire movie a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.
