Breaking the Waves

I just finished watching "Breaking the Waves" and am still not sure whether it was a good film or a strong piece of manipulation. Perhaps there is ultimately no difference.

Emily Watson was luminous and altogether convincing, and the camerawork didn't bother me in the slightest. On the contrary, it suited the story immensely - as did the deliberately washed-out palette. A brilliant invocation of a time and place.

However, the story left me feeling like I'd just watched someone kicking a puppy ... for several hours. I dislike the implication that such brutal and violent self-sacrifice can be justified by intense love, and to have this line wrapped up in a dewy religious shroud is a cop-out. It's like watching a documentary about the horrors of sideshow life - with plenty of explicit segments starring the freaks themselves. Allows an audience to moralize and yet be voyeurs at the same time.

Poor Bess was more than naive - whatever brain she was born with was utterly starved of oxygen by the narrow and restrictive community she was born into. I sympathized most with Dodo, who of them all loved Bess the most, and the least selfishly.

I find myself very angry after seeing "Breaking the Waves", which is why I cannot say that I disliked this film. Had I truly disliked it, my response would be less emotional.

There had not been a lot of movies I'd seen in a very long time, where the act of embracing one's faith in a greater power, and an unselfish, all-encompassing belief in unconditional love and trust were so vividly and powerfully portrayed. CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON so invests its characters with these traits, that I thought I would never see another film to rival it in this respect. I was sadly mistaken.

Neither Emily Watson or Stellan Skarsgard are as conventionally attractive as the kind of actors you would find in a big budget Hollywood production. Yet in their love scenes as Jan and Bess, I believe we get our very first glimpse on film of what sex between two people is meant to be as the Man Upstairs intended; not something dirty or vile or wanton, or anything as icily clinical as the conditions prescribed by Mother Church, but as a gift to us to be enjoyed, and therefore in turn the greatest gift that any one person can give to another as a sign of love and affection. That alone makes Skarsgard and Watson two of the sexiest, most passionate actors ever to make love on screen; they invest that much into Jan and Bess. I very nearly cried when Bess tells Jan in the throes of passion "Thank you." So deep, tender and uncalculating is her love for him, that he can't help but return it. Few of us will ever know a love of that capacity or intensity in our lifetimes.

Which is what makes this film's conceit easier to accept, and that much harder to bear. In these hard and cynical times, it would be easy to dismiss Bess as a feeble-minded idiot and have done with it. Had director Von Trier seen her story in that way, this would've been a pretty short film.

But when our love for another and our faith is all we have, no matter how misguided it is, no one has the right to question or debunk it, no matter how well-meaning they are. I don't think that Bess' fate could've been altered or avoided no matter how her husband's doctor, her mother, or her sister-in-law Dodo had tried to approach the situation. Her love for Jan and her faith in God are what simultaneously nourished, sustained, uplifted and destroyed her. At the end, she was afraid that maybe she had made a mistake investing herself in making the ultimate sacrifice, and maybe that's what Von Trier was trying to say with that ending, which I'm sure turned off a lot of viewers. If the sacrifices you make are in quest of such love and spirituality, then you can never be wrong.

That's a heady message, and a dangerous one if it is taken out of context. But for those who would condemn this film, I can only say this: you're not paying attention. BREAKING THE WAVES is a film about a woman fallen into promiscuity, the same way that BOOGIE NIGHTS is about a bunch of sleazy pornographers. If you're only looking at the surface, you shouldn't be questioning the content, but your own lack of vision.

Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves is the kind of film that makes me proud to be a film-goer and exceeds anything I could have possibly expected from the man who made Element of Crime. That film had some clever experimentation (and so does this one) but this film is the kind that's beauty and power echoes in your mind hours after you've watched it. This is a flabbergasting work of art that portrays a woman's quest to please God and does so with the complexity and emotional power of a Bergman film (not to mention the fact that the film portrays a woman's intense suffering in world sternly ruled by men with the power of a Dreyer film). If von Trier made nothing else of any merit for the rest of his career, if all he did was make marginally interesting film experiments, I wouldn't hesitate to call him a great filmmaker on the soul basis of this film. Anyway, you get the picture… The film stars Emily Watson as Bess, a shy and neurotic girl who is filled with joy to be with her new husband Jan (Stellan Skarsgard who is exceptional). When Jan is paralyzed after an accident at the oilrig he works in, he is in danger of losing his life. He convinces Bess to see other people and Bess wants nothing more than to make him happy and to prove to God that she loves him. After some disastrous complications, Bess is led to believe that she can please God and save Jan's life by having numerous sexual encounters with strangers in town. This sounds like a grungy tale, but von Trier tells it with such humanism and focus on his themes that we never feel like he is rubbing our faces in drear. And Watson is delightful, frightening, and heartbreaking as a woman who will stop at nothing to please those around her. Her one-sided conversations with God (in which she looks up in the air submissively and pleas and then looks down with a deep voice of wrath and scolds) are both funny and sad, not to mention the fact that they reveal seemingly endless amounts of details about who she is. The film is made with a hand-held camera and a visually stunning solarized style. This style does not make the movie; it just adds richness to each scene in the way it gives each face such shadowy texture. In the end, von Trier seems to believe in God but does not believe in the churches that try to codify what he wants. All of this works because of von Trier's passionate desire to understand how one can please God under horrendous terms; the epilogue, that takes the already-great material to a new level and shows how inspired von Trier is, starts with a moment of sad irony and then leaps to the skies with an image that fills the most atheistic person with questions and the more religiously spiritual people with hope. Here is a film that reaches for the stars and makes it there.

Without a doubt, this is one of the most emotionally devastating films I've ever seen in my life. It seems to be a rumination on the true nature of goodness. Bess is a simple creature and her purity and innocence are delivered by Emily Watson in a heartbreaking performance that you will not soon forget. It is a crime that Watson didn't win Best Actress for this role, though I imagine that many voters were turned off by the disturbing subject matter of this film. I had a visceral reaction to the film in the form of serious physical and emotional discomfort. I had rented it, and actually had to stop it at several points and give myself some time to recover before continuing on. I'm not sure it's a film that I'd ever want to see a second time, but I believe it is a true work of art and am grateful to have seen it.

Initially, this story about the marriage of young Scottish woman and a Scandinavian oil rig worker had my eyes glazing over. I was ready to hit the eject button about 20 minutes into the movie. But I held in there and slowly was drawn in to their lives, their environment, and the ghastly tragedy that confronts them.

Lars von Trier is a very patient storyteller, as well as being an eccentric movie maker. In Breaking the Waves, he slowly, very slowly unfolds his drama. The problem is; you have to pay careful attention, and this can be difficult. Von Trier's style, with its hand-held camera, lack of artificial lighting, grainy photography, and lingering close-ups can try the patience. The movie is also long, clocking in at about 2½ hours. But if you see it through, the final half hour will blow your mind, and you will have seen one of the best (and most emotionally powerful) movies of 1996, maybe even the whole decade.