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.

The first time I saw Breaking the Waves, I was astonished that Emily Watson had not acted for the cinema before her turn as Bess McNeill. What she brings to the role of the naive Scottish girl offers a clinic on superlative acting that could humble veterans with ten times the experience. Another thing that makes this film so special is that it never backs away from its vivid and mature examination of love, commitment, and aspects of the metaphysical. I easily class this work as one of the top films of the 1990s. Director Lars von Trier is a true visionary, and the (largely hand-held) cinematography by Robby Muller perfectly defines the tone of the film -- in fact, the theatre where I saw Breaking the Waves posted a disclaimer that warned anyone who suffers from motion or sea-sickness to see the film at their own peril!

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.

A film about love, faith, religion and many other things, it is a draining experience but yet fascinating to watch, with superb acting and an intriguing main character. It is surprising how gripping the film is, as it is difficult to watch, not just because of the subject matter, but also because of its style. Made by the conventions of Dogme '95, the film has many extreme close-ups, generally shaky camera-work and errors in continuity for editing and audio levels, all of which is supposed to amount to a film that looks and feels more realistic. With this film though, the quality of the acting and writing provide enough realism alone, and therefore the style serves no purpose other than to make the film more difficult to digest. It is an incredibly long film, and while this is not too much of a problem, the chapter markers are noticeably long without much reason either. Still, the film comes through despite its detracting bits. Watson, in her first film performance, is excellent, and Cartlidge provides great support. This is not an easy film to watch and like, but it is easy to admire what is done well in the film.

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.