Director: Lars von Trier
Writers: Lars von Trier, Peter Asmussen, David Pirie
Photography: Robby Muller
Music: Lars von Trier K-tel Collection
Editor: Anders Refn
Cast: Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgard, Katrin Cartlidge, Adrian Rawlins, Sandra Voe, Jean-Marc Barr, Jonathan Hackett, Udo Kier
Breaking the Waves is laid out like a big fat 19th-century novel with parts and sections and chapters. It's set in the early 1970s, proclaimed both by the heavy sideburns on many of the men and by the soundtrack with Jethro Tull, Mott the Hoople, Procol Harum, Roxy Music, Rod Stewart, T. Rex, and others. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes and Emily Watson even got an Oscar nomination. It's director Lars von Trier's fourth feature-length movie, and possibly the one most responsible for setting his reputation as a transgressive bad boy of cinema, though later films have tended toward ever more fixated transgressions.
The challenges to propriety here are related to religion, mental illness, and gender roles—three of von Trier's favorite themes. Emily Watson is Bess McNeill, a young woman who lives in a small cloistered religious community in Scotland. The church is harsh and Calvinist. If you die unredeemed the funeral service includes reminders that you are now burning in hell. In Calvinism, as I understand it, only God knows whether you are redeemed, so the safe assumption seems to be that you aren't and it's appropriate to point that out as you are buried. Bess may or may not be mentally ill or developmentally challenged. It's hard to tell when the church has this much control over a person's life.
Breaking the Waves is laid out like a big fat 19th-century novel with parts and sections and chapters. It's set in the early 1970s, proclaimed both by the heavy sideburns on many of the men and by the soundtrack with Jethro Tull, Mott the Hoople, Procol Harum, Roxy Music, Rod Stewart, T. Rex, and others. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes and Emily Watson even got an Oscar nomination. It's director Lars von Trier's fourth feature-length movie, and possibly the one most responsible for setting his reputation as a transgressive bad boy of cinema, though later films have tended toward ever more fixated transgressions.
The challenges to propriety here are related to religion, mental illness, and gender roles—three of von Trier's favorite themes. Emily Watson is Bess McNeill, a young woman who lives in a small cloistered religious community in Scotland. The church is harsh and Calvinist. If you die unredeemed the funeral service includes reminders that you are now burning in hell. In Calvinism, as I understand it, only God knows whether you are redeemed, so the safe assumption seems to be that you aren't and it's appropriate to point that out as you are buried. Bess may or may not be mentally ill or developmentally challenged. It's hard to tell when the church has this much control over a person's life.
Bess has fallen in love with a man outside her community who works on an oil rig in the North Sea—Jan (Stellan Skarsgard). They want to marry. The church elders are dubious at best—about Bess's very competence as well as about the outsider Jan—but she's of age to marry and bear children so they reluctantly approve it. The love affair of Bess and Jan is hard to read, partly because von Trier and the other screenwriters don't seem to have a very firm grip on it themselves. It's highly sexually charged and at times Jan seems to be merely taking advantage of her simplicity, especially after an accident on the oil rig leaves him paralyzed. At other times their love is presented as so exalted we cannot begin to comprehend it even with Elton John providing the musical cues.
The turning point to this story comes after Jan's accident on the rig. He is paralyzed as a result and asks Bess to have sex with other men and report the experiences to him. No one likes this plan, including Bess. Jan's doctor considers it sick abuse as do most who hear about it. Her mother is ready to throw her out and the church is looking at casting her out. As the audience, however, we see Jan make his request to Bess and all his arguments for it. It doesn't seem so sick then. The movie is shaded to make it seem like an expression of love others will never understand. There is an inside and outside to this—the movie flatters us by inviting us to be inside, to understand where this decision is coming from, even to approve it. But is the movie doing to us what most of the characters in this movie think Jan is doing to Bess—manipulating for sick pleasure or as a sick response to his condition?
It seems likely, but as the movie goes along we nonetheless tend to stay sympathetic to Bess and Jan, even—or perhaps especially—as the degradations begin. We see Bess talking it over with God in her prayers. As charmingly as Watson puts this over, Bess's style of praying is that she does both parts, and it is perhaps the single best example we see of her actual, real mental unbalance. She is inept at seducing men, of course, even wearing a lurid prostitute costume, and inevitably she gets herself into a lot of scrapes we wish she had the sense to avoid.
The overt comparison is to Mary Magdalene, which I take as mere cynicism on von Trier's part. But the cynicism does not stop there. Bess believes she caused Jan's accident by asking God to bring him home early from the rig. She believes, both as an obedient wife and for reasons of atonement, that she must do what Jan asks. She believes God will heal him if she does the right things. The doctor is far more pessimistic, flatly telling her friend, sister-in-law, and protector Dodo (Katrin Cartlidge) that there won't be any miracles in this case.
However, spoilers, Jan is seen verging on complete recovery after Bess dies following a beating in an unfortunate encounter, accompanied by three stirring Elton John songs: "Love Lies Bleeding," "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," and "Your Song." Now Jan is revealed as deeply in grief over Bess's death. His feelings about her have been somewhat ambiguous before but suddenly he is much more obviously on board with her general wonderfulness and transformation to saintliness.
My main question—because this movie genuinely is so stark and dramatic, beautiful and compelling—is whether or not von Trier is laughing at us for pulling these tricks. I know people say it about other directors too, such as David Lynch or the Coen brothers, which I have always been quick to dismiss. They're not laughing at us, they're just making movies. But here I am with that suspicion of von Trier and many of his movies. Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, and Antichrist in many ways carry on the same balancing act, pitting faith against rationality in ludicrously unbelievable ways he keeps asking us to believe. But not until Melancholia, his best film, would he again hit the high points he gets to here. In sum, Breaking the Waves is eminently worth dismissing for various reasons of creative dishonesty, yet it is utterly enthralling and moving and not to be missed.
The turning point to this story comes after Jan's accident on the rig. He is paralyzed as a result and asks Bess to have sex with other men and report the experiences to him. No one likes this plan, including Bess. Jan's doctor considers it sick abuse as do most who hear about it. Her mother is ready to throw her out and the church is looking at casting her out. As the audience, however, we see Jan make his request to Bess and all his arguments for it. It doesn't seem so sick then. The movie is shaded to make it seem like an expression of love others will never understand. There is an inside and outside to this—the movie flatters us by inviting us to be inside, to understand where this decision is coming from, even to approve it. But is the movie doing to us what most of the characters in this movie think Jan is doing to Bess—manipulating for sick pleasure or as a sick response to his condition?
It seems likely, but as the movie goes along we nonetheless tend to stay sympathetic to Bess and Jan, even—or perhaps especially—as the degradations begin. We see Bess talking it over with God in her prayers. As charmingly as Watson puts this over, Bess's style of praying is that she does both parts, and it is perhaps the single best example we see of her actual, real mental unbalance. She is inept at seducing men, of course, even wearing a lurid prostitute costume, and inevitably she gets herself into a lot of scrapes we wish she had the sense to avoid.
The overt comparison is to Mary Magdalene, which I take as mere cynicism on von Trier's part. But the cynicism does not stop there. Bess believes she caused Jan's accident by asking God to bring him home early from the rig. She believes, both as an obedient wife and for reasons of atonement, that she must do what Jan asks. She believes God will heal him if she does the right things. The doctor is far more pessimistic, flatly telling her friend, sister-in-law, and protector Dodo (Katrin Cartlidge) that there won't be any miracles in this case.
However, spoilers, Jan is seen verging on complete recovery after Bess dies following a beating in an unfortunate encounter, accompanied by three stirring Elton John songs: "Love Lies Bleeding," "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road," and "Your Song." Now Jan is revealed as deeply in grief over Bess's death. His feelings about her have been somewhat ambiguous before but suddenly he is much more obviously on board with her general wonderfulness and transformation to saintliness.
My main question—because this movie genuinely is so stark and dramatic, beautiful and compelling—is whether or not von Trier is laughing at us for pulling these tricks. I know people say it about other directors too, such as David Lynch or the Coen brothers, which I have always been quick to dismiss. They're not laughing at us, they're just making movies. But here I am with that suspicion of von Trier and many of his movies. Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, and Antichrist in many ways carry on the same balancing act, pitting faith against rationality in ludicrously unbelievable ways he keeps asking us to believe. But not until Melancholia, his best film, would he again hit the high points he gets to here. In sum, Breaking the Waves is eminently worth dismissing for various reasons of creative dishonesty, yet it is utterly enthralling and moving and not to be missed.
My memory is the classic rock works very well in this. Giving the story which is otherwise austere and inscrutable a grand epic sweep. -Skip
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