An Anti-Musical’s Anti-Star

It’s been a miserable summer in the city--cold, rainy--but for techno-pop chanteuse Bjork, who has spent most of it in the city, it’s been delightful. After all, she is from chilly Iceland, which to most Americans might as well be the moon. Even far-flung places have their exports, however. Bjork is Iceland’s cultural ambassador, a celebrity, a cult figure, a curiosity, because of her eclectic music and videos, her punk Valkyrie image, and now her role in Danish director Lars von Trier’s “Dancer in the Dark,” a musical that won the Palme d’Or and a best actress award for her at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

Because of the film, Bjork’s ambassadorship has been raised to a new level--not that this has been pleasant for her. Notoriously press-shy, she finds herself having some explaining to do regarding “Dancer in the Dark.” In fact, she’s been in New York this cold, rainy summer doing just that (and recording a new album to be released next spring, tentatively called “Domestika”). “It seems we had some communication difficulties,” Von Trier says dryly, doing some explaining of his own. At Cannes, Bjork and Von Trier made headlines by feuding over the film. She was unhappy with him because of how he handled her music (collectively called “Selmasongs,” to be released Sept. 19).

He was unhappy with her because she walked off the set and disappeared, refused to promote the movie and prevented a screening of it. He called her “a madwoman,” in part because she took the role excessively to heart, making direction of her difficult. She was so nutty during filming that she reportedly ate her clothes.

“That’s rubbish,” Bjork says in an Icelandic-British accent that even co-star Catherine Deneuve calls “weird.” “I think they were trying to create a scandal, a hype around the film. But I’m a great lover of storytelling, coming from the land of the sagas. I thought it was funny. I guess there’s a line there, and that’s why I decided to defend myself--not to defend myself so much but defend her [Selma, the character she plays]. Even though I don’t think it’s a fantastic film, I think it’s precious. It’s three years of my life, and I care a lot for it.”

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Audiences seem as divided about the film as Bjork does, either crying or shaking their fists at the screen. It is set in Washington state during the 1950s. Selma is a Czech emigre who lives in a trailer with her son and works in a factory making steel sinks along with her best friend, Kathy (Deneuve). She is slowly going blind and is saving money for an operation to prevent the same thing from happening to her son, who is unaware of his condition (and hers). In a sequence as melodramatic as it sounds, her money is stolen, she murders the thief and ends up on death row.

A simple woman, an obsessive love, a terrible choice: All of this is reminiscent of Von Trier’s breakout film, “Breaking the Waves,” in which Emily Watson’s character prostitutes herself to save her husband’s life.

Like “Breaking the Waves,” much of “Dancer in the Dark” is shot in a hand-held documentary style in conformance with the rules of Dogma 95, the filmmaking creed that rejects Hollywood-style production values. Scenes are caught rather than “created.” However, the scenes in this film are occasionally interrupted by Selma’s escapist fantasies, highly choreographed musical numbers in which she sings and dances to the accompaniment of violins and ambient noise.

Call it an anti-musical, with Bjork as its anti-star. Nobody is going to confuse her with Judy Garland or Debbie Reynolds. Her character wears heavy, black-rimmed glasses, speaks as if she’s been dubbed and is generally frumpy. Her singing is an ecstatic, mournful croon. She moves rather than dances. And yet you can’t take your eyes off her.

“I think she’s remarkable,” Von Trier says. “There are some moments in this film--not the story or the action, just her performance or her presence--that make me cry.”

Bjork says her acting was a matter of complete indifference to her.

“I have no ambition as an actress,” she says. “I wanted to care, but I didn’t. I remember Catherine Deneuve saying, ‘Don’t you think it’s amazing that you can just become someone else?’ And I just looked at her and said no. It’s not appealing to me at all. I tried to explain this to Lars. I feel I haven’t even fully become what I am, the potential I was given, and I have to work really hard, for 40 years at least, to bring out the songs that I hear in my head. To become someone else seems like a waste of time.”

“I don’t know if you can say she’s acting, she’s so much living the situation,” says Deneuve, who seems both sympathetic and bemused by Bjork (and spent New Year’s Eve in Reykjavik with her). “I tried to help her, to protect her from being too vulnerable. That’s why it was so hard, and that’s why she had conflicts with Lars, because it was so painful for her.”

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Originally Bjork was enlisted to compose the soundtrack, not act--though that’s not how Von Trier sees it--but even getting her that far was like pulling teeth. She says she had been resisting Von Trier’s entreaties until she watched a tape of “Breaking the Waves,” which blew her away. She was also at a point in her recording career where she wanted to write from another person’s point of view, having written her first three solo albums (“Debut,” “Post,” “Homogenic”) largely about herself. Previous to that, she had been a member of the Sugarcubes, a pop-rock band, after a teenage career as a punk-New Wave musician.

Now 34, Bjork began making music professionally when she was 11. That’s nearly 25 years in the business, those last 14 raising a son, Sindri. Over the years she’s embraced a variety of musical styles without repackaging herself, too idiosyncratic to be anything other than who she is. She’s sui generis. And that is what Von Trier, who saw her in a music video but knew nothing about her (he says his taste in avant-garde music runs to early ABBA), found so appealing.

So Bjork decided to meet him next time she was in Denmark, in late 1997. She read the script, fell in love with Selma and agreed to participate. There followed what she describes as the most enjoyable part of the process, in which they worked together intimately and each could claim an area of expertise that could aid and enrich the other. She says that Von Trier joked about her acting in the film. And then it wasn’t a joke.

“After a year, once we’d done the music and I was ready to move on to my next record, he said that if I wouldn’t do the film, he wouldn’t do the film,” she says.

Von Trier says this is true, in the sense that he rewrote the script with her in mind. Though his ultimatum sounds like a form of extortion, Bjork says he was pushing her in a direction she was already going in. Part of it was her desire to see the project through to the end, and part of it was her identification with Selma. She believed she knew the character better than he did, that “he felt she was quite a silly woman and a stupid victim, martyr for sure. I felt she had a lot of depth and she might not be an intellectual, but I think she was very wise.

“I also wanted to bring out a lot of joy in her,” Bjork continues, in a manner that suggests she’s talking about herself as well as Selma. “I think people who are not introverts tend to think it’s a bad thing. But it isn’t. You’re walking the hills and you’re euphoric, you’re tripping. It’s a very happy thing to hear music in your head when you’re on your own. It might be escapism, but it’s the place where everything falls into place and everybody is friends. It’s not a suffering place. Lars really disagreed with me on that one, him being quite a fan of suffering. I’m not against suffering. I think it definitely exists. But I think celebrating it is a bit of an anti-life statement.”

Bjork surrendered to Von Trier’s worldview during the dramatic sequences, saying he broke her down psychologically. But she steadfastly maintained her right to present her positive approach during the musical numbers--and, more to the point, have a say in how they were edited and mixed. She says she understands how important it is to a director to control every aspect of a production, though it doesn’t sound as if she applied this knowledge.

“Both of us are used to working with people who do what we want them to do,” Von Trier says. “And that means you have to change your way of communicating now that you communicate with somebody who’s really alive, in the sense that they give you feedback or a struggle. I think both of us--forgive me, Bjork, for saying this--have been a little bit childish, because we have always been so much closer than we would admit.”

While Bjork may or may not have understood the director’s prerogative, she definitely didn’t understand the filmmaking process, its endless tedious messiness. Von Trier says she was used to being in the mountains with her muse rather than on set at 9 in morning doing pickup shots, etc. And when she says that her music was being “chopped up,” this too may betray a certain ignorance. Movies are (one hopes) an artful arrangement of chopped-up bits.

After two months of simmering and with a month still to go, Bjork boiled over, walking off on a Friday and returning the following Monday with a “manifesto” for Von Trier to sign giving her some say in the musical sequences. This was a big deal to her, because as an “old punk,” she doesn’t believe in contracts. She says her contract on “Dancer in the Dark” was a handshake with Von Trier.

At first Von Trier balked at signing the document, but then he relented and she returned Tuesday to complete the movie. However, Von Trier claims it was not a manifesto but a contract, which she wanted renegotiated, though he agrees with her in saying it was about music, not money. But inevitably it was about money for him.

“I think it’s a little late when you’ve shot two-thirds of it,” he says. “This production company I have we’ve used 10 years to build. Bjork had the power to destroy--to make a hole in that.”

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Their disputes didn’t end with principal photography. Bjork says her music was trampled by the sounds of footsteps, which had been dropped in during post-production--as they are in most movies, though usually unobtrusively. Consequently she stopped a screening of it before Cannes and complained about the quality of the print at the festival, which initially she wasn’t even going to attend. When she did, Deneuve says she tried to talk her into appearing at a joint press conference to answer some of the charges swirling around. But she refused, in part because, as Deneuve puts it, she’s “very, very shy.” However, when Von Trier accepted the Palme d’Or, Bjork came onstage, surprising him so much that he dropped it.

This is not the only irony, however. It turns out that the painful process of being someone else, of subordinating herself, of promoting--and defending--the final product has revealed Bjork to herself and to the public in ways her music never could.

“I’ve been three years Selma,” Bjork says. “Doing these interviews is a graceful way to wave it goodbye. I think I’ve learned to communicate, especially when I’m abroad and in English. But it’s something I’ve learned. It’s something that Selma hasn’t. Where she has no choice, I have.”