The music, unfortunately, isn't stellar enough to act as much of a distraction. Björk, who also scored the movie, is one of the most captivating and complex figures in pop music: She's part pixie princess, part torch singer; part deconstructivist modernist, part romantic landscapist. Her lovely wayward warble, especially her shivery reading of "My Favorite Things," is at least a welcome relief -- a familiar and pleasing voice calling out from a landscape far more rocky and parched than Iceland. Divorced from their setting, the songs may have some sparks I couldn't catch in the theater. (I confess that since I saw the movie, I haven't had the stomach to risk reliving the horror by listening to the music.) But in situ, they seemed pointlessly meandering, droney and dull, as if the grayness of the movie had leached into them.

Björk, who won the prize for best actress at Cannes for this performance, almost escapes that grayness. (The film also won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, to boos from the audience.) She shows both a sweetness and a kind of openness that suit the character perfectly, and she knows how to deliver a line -- the odd pacing of the dialogue has nothing to do with her and everything to do with von Trier's gummy style. (It permeates every scene in this movie, as well as "Breaking the Waves.") Björk has claimed in a recent Esquire interview that her experience with von Trier, which she characterized as one of "profound cruelty," has soured her on acting forever, and that's a shame: She's gently appealing, and even in her toughest, most over-the-top scenes, she has a sense of restraint that allows her to maintain her dignity amid the meshugas. Her scenes with her young son, Gene (Vladan Kostic), in particular have an affable and touching quality -- she adores him and mothers him, but she's so girlish herself that they're almost like young cubs together.

Von Trier doesn't know what to do with a good actress when he gets one. Judging from Björk's performance here, and from Emily Watson's in "Breaking the Waves," it's clear he delights in finding actresses whose faces are capable of virtually beaming with hope, just so he can twist, bend and break their characters to fit his wretched little stories. ("Oh, Daddy, how lovely, you've brought me a kitten! And a great big anvil on a pulley for little brother!") Von Trier surely believes he's creating high drama with his little puppet plays, but broken down, his approach is almost shockingly simplistic: His method involves taking characters we want to believe in, characters we'd like to love, and doing the equivalent of tying them onto railroad tracks as the train approaches -- repeatedly during the course of a movie. He spends the greater part of a picture getting them untied just in the nick of time, until the last time ... Alas! It's too late. That's not dramatization; it's a lazy formula masquerading as high art.

A director isn't a misogynist simply because he shows us a suffering woman. But when that suffering becomes the axis of a picture (as in both "Dancer in the Dark" and "Breaking the Waves"), the force that generates all its momentum, with no redemption and no relief in sight, with no point beyond the suffering itself, you have to wonder if he's not just getting his jollies off it. Von Trier cleverly disguises his stories as feminist tales -- fables about women who stand up to bullies, who stand up for what's right, who speak up for their own needs and desires, only to be broken and destroyed in the end. The outward message is: "See how women are punished for integrity and honesty?" And it's always either a man or an unjust god who's doing the punishing.

Great art can be, and has been, made out of similar raw materials: Look at Thomas Hardy. But von Trier doesn't have the thistle-rough delicacy of Hardy, or the thundering compassion. As viewers and as human beings, we can't help feeling sympathy for Selma in her hopeless and grave situation. But von Trier's jerky camera moves and meandering pace, far from making us forget that we're watching a movie, only remind us that we're being manipulated in the most obvious and cheapest way. For all his ideals and alleged standards, he's a mechanic, not an artist, a builder of highfalutin meat grinders to feed his characters through. In the case of "Breaking the Waves," the mess that came out the other end smelled bad enough. With "Dancer in the Dark," von Trier is long past his sell-by date.

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