DANCER IN THE DARK

Directed by Lars von Trier. Starring Björk, David Morse, Catherine Deneuve

More po-faced and humourless than anything Peter Greenaway has ever put his name to, Lars von Trier's hideous quasi-musical Dancer In The Dark represents the absolute ultimate in bullshit arthouse pretension, and serves as a stunning illustration of how spectacularly the much-praised Dogme format has wound up peddling the precise inverse of everything it originally intended to achieve.

Unmistakably Scandinavian in tone, Dancer pitches itself as an out-and-out tragedy, a description it eventually achieves for all the wrong reasons.

Pretension run riot is by no means the least of Dancer In The Dark's sins, however: what lingers most painfully in the memory is Icelandic imp Björk's unbelievably irritating central performance as Selma, a Czech immigrant on the point of losing her sight (though not, tragically, her voice).

A factory-worker so obsessed with Gene Kelly-era musicals that she creates music in her head from the industrial factory-noise around her (yep, it really is that obtuse), Selma is frantically scraping together the money for her sight-saving operation, in order to prevent her son suffering the same fate. From roughly the midway point of this 140-minute marathon onwards, tragedy piles upon tragedy upon more tragedy, until you're left watching the equivalent of a Death Row musical.

As uninvolving as the narrative is, it's the music itself which serves as the chief source of audience torture. Björk acts almost as hysterically as she sings, and with the same combination of precious self-indulgence and insufferably contrived 'zaniness' that has disfigured her entire recorded output to date. To make things worse, she appropriates the camera's gaze for practically the film's entire duration, while warbling a succession of thoroughly excruciating, self-penned musical numbers which spew forth bucketloads of her trademark 'ethereal' insubstantial hippy-dippy babble: you'd almost laugh, if the woman wasn't making your ears bleed with her unrelenting foghorn wail.

Even if one removes the musical content, Dancer In The Dark is still one truly forbidding affair, a tortuous depression-fest of sun-starved Scandinavian misery, unrelieved by humour, irony or anything remotely resembling realistic dialogue. While it strives to hold up as harrowing melodrama, it's fair to say that there's more emotional punch in the average episode of Coronation Street - and the self-conscious artefactuality of von Trier's approach renders it one of the least emotionally engaging films I've ever seen.

The scary thing is that Dancer has been ecstatically received everywhere it's been shown, incredibly managing to land the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Festival in what can only be deemed world cinema's most plaintive cry for help yet.

Avoid, on pain of death.