Song and dance

Noel Vera

Gil Portes' "Munting Tinig" (Small Voices) is about a teacher
(Alessandra de Rossi) who arrives at a backwater town as substitute
for the school's departing teacher, said substitute being not much
older than the students themselves. The film is an amalgam of Zhang
Yimou's "Not One Less," Majid Majidi's "Children of Heaven," "Sister
Act" and "Stand and Deliver," among others, but that's not the
problem (Portes claims that the shared uniform is a true story); the
problem is that the film is so erratically made and poorly paced
that all you're left with, sitting out there in the dark, is
pointing out the influences. There's a focus on the extraneous (de
Rossi listening to her landlady (Gina Alajar) talk endlessly about
her daughter (the recently departed teacher)), while skimping on the
crucial (after proposing that the children join a choral singing
contest and meeting parental and administrative resistance, de Rossi
simply wakes up the next morning to learn her project is approved).
The camera understates to the point of dullness (some scenes look
flat enough for TV), but when approaching a dramatic climax,
suddenly loses all shame (crying is done in drawn-out close-ups, to
catch every falling drop).

This being a small-budgeted, small-scale film, characterization
should play a crucial role; unfortunately it's mostly a hit-or-miss
affair (more a miss-than-hit affair). De Rossi's teacher is the
standard-issue stereotype of the noble educator, with a few off-key
details: she comes to town hoping to do a bit of service and brings
along (as a symbol, probably unintentional, of her higher cultural
and financial capabilities) her flute. She has inchoate ambitions
about making a difference, but depends on the allowance her mother
sends her to buy boxes of ice candy and the odd chorale costume
(must be a generous-sized allowance there). And she's so passive--
all she does through the film is walk around, eyes huge with
indignation at the tremendous inadequacies of the Philippine
educational system (doesn't she watch the evening news, or read the
papers?). When she's not being shocked she's an open bucket, ready
to receive every passing soul's two centavos' worth of wisdom and/or
advice (Alajar being her landlady dumps about a hundred pesos
nightly).

It's a pity especially you realize just how easy it would have been
to make de Rossi's character interesting--simply ask: what kind of
person is crazy enough to want to become a schoolteacher? Worse, a
schoolteacher in the provinces? De Rossi's character could have been
hiding some kind of inner inadequacy--a hunger to prove herself to
her mother, maybe, or a driving need to live up to her father's
idealism. She could initially come off as being too aggressive, or
too strident, or too demanding; or, like the teacher in "Not One
Less," totally indifferent to everything except the promise of extra
money--anything to contrast with the eventual nobility. Even a
villain would help; Dexter Doria shows some snap and bite early on,
as the school supervisor who sells ice candy in her spare time, but
by latter half of the picture she's in the sidelines, leading the
cheerleader squad. Purely virtuous protagonists are the most
difficult to dramatize; they need a tremendous amount of care and
attention to detail to bring off convincingly, otherwise they end up
looking like plaster saints. Portes with his casual, off-the-cuff
approach fails, his audience fails to believe accordingly, and the
film as a result fails to come to life.

Lars von Trier's "Dancer in the Dark" is a different kind of failure-
-maybe not of technique (as he showed in films like "Breaking the
Waves" or "The Idiots") but of artistic choice. In his case he seems
so eager to torture his innocent victims (Emma Watson in "Breaking,"
Bjork in "Dancer") that he skips a few story points along the way.
Now, this is either deliberate or gross incompetence, and von Trier
apparently isn't incompetent ("The Idiots," the only film of his I
actually like so far, is the best proof of this), so it's got to be
deliberate.

So…Bjork plays Selma, a Czech immigrant to the Northwest who happens
to be going blind; her son has inherited her debilitating condition,
and she's been slowly and painfully saving up money for an operation
to permanently cure her son's eyesight. Von Trier doesn't cheat on
details, at least at this point: Bjork works hard, volunteers for
night shift work, keeps working despite the fact that her weariness
and fading vision make her an occupational hazard; it doesn't help
that she has a tendency to go into dreamy reveries where she's the
center of a musical number (sparked partly by her exhaustion, partly
by her love of musicals, partly by von Trier's admiration for Dennis
Potters' "Pennies from Heaven"--a, to my mind, far subtler, more
emotionally devastating film).

It's only a matter of time, of course (those who wish to see the
picture might want to skip the next two paragraphs); when she makes
an expensive mistake she's fired. But that's not the only iron von
Trier has burning in the fire: Bjork's neighbor Bill (David Morse,
extremely good) is attracted to her, and takes advantage of her
naiveté to work up a kind of creepily trusting, faintly exploitative
friendship; when he sees a chance, he steals all her money. Bjork's
confrontation with Bill is the single most painful and powerful
scene in the film, with Bill using all the trust and regard Selma
has for him to persuade her to leave him be; malevolent intelligence
collides with stubborn innocence, the upshot of which is that Selma
is arrested and charged with murder.

Selma's job loss and arrest happen within hours of each other, on
top of which Selma is assigned the world's most incompetent defense
lawyer (if I were more paranoid, I'd say von Trier really has it in
for his heroine). A possible reprieve suddenly looms in the horizon,
which Selma quickly slaps down: she wants her son's eyesight
restored no matter what, even if she has to be executed to make this
possible (even if von Trier has to torture circumstances way beyond
plausibility to make this possible). Selma's friend Kathy (Catherine
Deneuve, very good) complains that her son needs her as a mother
more than he needs his eyesight, at which point you realize that we
haven't seen enough scenes of Selma and her son together to decide
ourselves if she's right (if she is, Selma's choice is more
wrongheadedly tragic, if she isn't, Selma's choice is easier to
approve of; either way we would understand what's happening better).
Von Trier, however, doesn't seem so interested in making us
understand as he is in making us squirm, which the audience does,
for different reasons: some in sympathy for her heartrending plight,
others for the sheer shamelessness of von Trier's style of audience
manipulation.

Which is about it, except that the song and dance numbers--their
staging, their camerawork--are so achingly awful you might wish von
Trier had put you out of your misery as well. Which, again, is
perhaps deliberate: Selma's probably a mediocre dancer and singer,
so her fantasy numbers are equally mediocre (though wouldn't it be
as easy to demand the best, in a fantasy?).

(First published in Businessworld, July 4, 2003)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)