Since premiering at this year’s Cannes International Film Festival, Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark has radically divided its viewers into two distinct camps – those that love the film, and those that think it’s a piece of garbage.  The film won both the coveted Palme d'Or (for best feature) and the Best Actress award at Cannes, but the announcement was met with boos and hisses.

Critics are just as split as the audiences in Cannes, some hailing it as a stunning success while others reserve their harshest condemnations for von Trier’s (The Idiots) picture.  Fine Line Features, Dancer’s U.S. distributor, uses the shocking disparity on the home page of the film’s official website, with "Entertainment Weekly" gushing words like “exhilarating,” “astonishing,” and “a triumph,” while "Variety" grumbled it was "artistically bankrupt on every level."

Despite all of this, I was surprised to find Dancer extremely mediocre.  It’s certainly not a bad film, but it isn’t a great one, either.  I thought the best part about it was the performance of Björk, and my critique is more positive than negative because of her.  Admittedly, I am a huge fan of the Icelandic pop star, so people that don’t care for her music may like Dancer considerably less.

Dancer is set in small town in Washington State during 1964.  Björk plays Selma, an immigrant from the former Czechoslovakia living in a trailer located in the back yard of a local policeman named Bill (David Morse, Bait).  Selma works in a factory, but her job performance is hindered by a hereditary disease that will rob her of her sight within a year.  The possibility of being rendered sightless doesn’t seem to bother Selma, who works double shifts at the factory to squirrel away money for her 12-year-old son Gene (Vladica Kostic) to have an operation to correct the inherited ocular disorder that he will soon develop.

Selma also has a fondness of musicals, spending her spare time at the theatre with co-worker and best friend Kathy (Catherine Deneuve, East West), and is even set to play Maria in a local production of “The Sound of Music.”  As her eyesight becomes worse and worse, Selma is forced to make changes to her daily routines, but her spirits remain high, and her desire to save money for Gene (named after Gene Kelly?) becomes only stronger.

Oh, and there’s singing, too.  Dancer features six musical numbers (written and performed by Björk).  Song is Selma’s means of escape from her dreary, monotonous job, with the rhythmic clatter of the machines helping her daydream about dance routines like the ones she saw in American films as a child in Czechoslovakia.  “I’ve got little games I play when it goes really hard,” Selma says, “I just start dreaming and it all becomes music.”  And, boy, does it.  The choreographed musical numbers are a striking contrast to the dowdy appearance and feel of the rest of the film.

It’s hard to watch Dancer and not think of von Trier’s Breaking the Waves.  Both pictures were filmed using handheld video cameras, giving the final products a shaky, dizzying look.  Both are set years ago in tiny towns with close-knit communities.  And both featured stunning debut performances from female leads (Björk here, and Emily Watson in Waves) that play haunting and, ultimately, doomed characters that seem a little kooky, but end up making sacrifices that the rest of us would never dream of.

Even the opening of Dancer is reminiscent of Waves.  Here, von Trier begins with a three-minute overture played over abstract paintings that slowly dissolve into one another.  You might remember Von Trier doing something similar before each “chapter” in Waves.  While both films are both triumphant and tragic, Dancer has an ending that’s a vast improvement over the disappointing epilogue in Waves.

It’s tough to say whether the eccentric Danish director was trying to make a film that shows a strong, pure character making the ultimate sacrifice for a loved one, or if it was just a tongue-in-cheek poke at the allure that sweeping American musicals have on susceptible children in other countries.  Imagine thinking that America is one big, gaudy song-and-dance number with a happy ending, only to get here, work your fingers to the bone and then go blind.

von Trier has indicated that his parents strongly disapproved of big Hollywood musicals.  But, then again, your typical Hollywood musical usually doesn’t have a scene where a guy gets his head bashed in.  I wonder if they’d be happy with Dancer.

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