Breaking the Waves

Director: Lars von Trier
Screenplay: Lars von Trier
Stars: Emily Watson (Bess McNeill), Stellan Skarsgård (Jan Nyman), Katrin Cartlidge (Dodo McNeill), Jean-Marc Barr (Terry), Adrian Rawlins (Dr. Richardson), Jonathan Hackett (Priest), Sandra Voe (Mother), Udo Kier (Sadistic Sailor), Mikkel Gaup (Pits), Roef Ragas (Pim), Phil McCall (Grandfather), Robert Robertson (Chairman), Desmond Reilly (An Elder), Sarah Gudgeon (Sybilla)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 1996
Country: Denmark / Sweden / France / Netherlands / Norway / Iceland / Spain
Breaking the Waves: Criterion Collection Blu-ray
Breaking the WavesBreaking the Waves is a complex and disturbing look at what one woman would do for the sake of love and how her desire to be her husband’s salvation conflicts with the moral tenants of her strict religious community. It is at once a religious allegory and an attack on Christian fundamentalism, wrapped up in art house pretension and grainy, hand-held camerawork. It was also the breakthrough film for Danish director Lars von Trier, who had already made his mark in Europe with a series of stylish, innovative thrillers and a heralded television miniseries that had developed a cult following in the U.S., and the film’s success both commercially and critically (it won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, which ever since has bestowed awards on virtually all of von Trier’s films) cemented the director’s status as an artist you couldn’t ignore, even if you loathed his work. Like most of von Trier’s subsequent films, Breaking the Waves is awash in contradiction, and it forces concepts on the viewer that must be absolutely accepted or rejected. Depending on how you deal with those concepts will determine whether this film is an idiosyncratic masterpiece or a lot of anti-establishment blathering.

The film opens with Bess (Emily Watson in a painfully intense performance), a wide-eyed, childlike woman with a history of emotional instability who lives on a tiny, remote Scottish island sometime in the mid-1970s, explaining to her church elders why she is going to marry an “outsider,” a large but lovable Danish oil rig worker named Jan (Stellan Skarsgård). The village where Bess lives is dominated by the fundamentalist church and its stern, repressive Calvinistic ideals. The church can make you into a village outcast, women are not allowed to speak during services, and the unsmiling gray elders don’t blink while standing at a funeral intoning that the recently deceased is on her way to hell.

Once Bess and Jan are married, she is so excited to consummate their relationship that she allows Jan to deflower her in a church bathroom upstairs during the reception in an awkward, but oddly touching scene (“What do I do?” she asks him quietly). It is quickly evident in Bess’s eyes that she has found a new, loving experience, and the film makes a passionate and compelling argument for the power of sexual intimacy between two people who love each other. The scenes of Bess and Jan making love are graphically portrayed in their naturalism, but they are touching because you realize that emotion and passion are being shared, not just raw physicality. One of the film’s best scenes involves the sheer wonderment on Bess’s face when she sees Jan naked for the first time. In her innocence, she is the epitome of true, selfless love.

But then Jan has to leave to work on the offshore oil rig for weeks at a time, and Bess is thrown into hysterics, the first true hint of her obsessive personality. Bess, who has an intense relationship with God in which she speaks for both of them, her voice being small and childlike and God’s being deep and autocratic, prays that God bring Jan home, a prayer that is apparently answered in the worst way when Jan has a serious accident on the rig that paralyzes him from the neck down. Bess blames herself, believing that God is testing her and Jan’s love, much the way He tested Job. This makes her more determined than ever to be faithful to Jan and sacrifice whatever she can for him.

The film takes a bizarre and largely inexplicable turn when Jan, who fears that he will never be able to make love to his wife again, asks Bess to take a lover and then tell him the details. He tells her that this is the only way he can live, and without it, he will die. While she understandably refuses at first, repulsed by his perverse request, when Jan’s condition worsens, she reluctantly agrees. First she tries to seduce Jan’s friendly doctor (Adrian Rawlins), and when that fails she is reduced to fondling a stranger on a bus and then dressing like a prostitute and picking up men at bars. Every time she has a sexual encounter, Jan’s condition improves.

Soon whispers are going about the village, and Bess’s caring, but increasingly exasperated sister-in-law (Katrin Cartlidge) is questioning her activities. “Are you sleeping with other men to feed his sick fantasies?” she cries. “His head’s full of scars—he’s up to his eyeballs in drugs!” The church casts Bess out, previously friendly children throw stones at her in the street, but no matter—Bess believes that her willingness to sexually debase herself for Jan is his salvation, so much that she is willing to be with men that seasoned prostitutes rightly fear. She doesn’t care what others think because inside she believes that what she is doing is right, and she will endure physical pain and depravation for her husband. She is martyrdom incarnate.

von Trier has described his film as a simple love story, but it’s obviously much more than that. Breaking the Waves wants nothing more than to turn the entire Judeo-Christian sense of morality upside down and ask, “What is right?” “What is good?” “What is salvation?” Of course, Christ did the same thing, so von Trier (who professed to be Catholic at the time he made the film, having converted from his parents’ atheism) turns Bess into a suffering Christ figure while branding the church elders as the misguided Pharisees. Bess’s obsessive love for Jan is above their petty rules, and she understands what they cannot because she has a direct line to God.

There is a fundamental problem, however, that upends Breaking the Waves and reveals it to be more silly (or misguided) than serious. Simply put, there is no justification—narratively, morally, or otherwise—for Jan’s salvation to be tied to Bess’s sexual degradation. It is a completely arbitrary connection that von Trier does not develop, but simply drops in our laps and asks us to accept, even as if flies in the face of everything that is good and moving about the film. The depiction of Bess and Jan’s marriage makes such an effective argument for the beauty and power of sex between a husband and wife that it undermines the second half of the film. If von Trier really believes in the spirituality of lovemaking, how can he base Jan’s salvation on Bess sexually debasing herself? The idea might have been plausible had Jan asked her to find another man who she could truly love, so that he would know that she was actually “making love” and not being systematically and willfully raped, but this is not the case. As it stands, his request is perverse, cruel, and twisted.

But, because von Trier is determined to make Bess into a Christ figure, he has to make her suffer for her love, something he would explore again in his next two films, The Idiots (1998) and the Palm d’Or-winning Dancer in the Dark (2000), both of which are equally problematic on myriad levels. The analogy falls apart at a basic level because humankind did not ask Christ to suffer for humankind. Christianity is based on the notion that God chose to offer Christ’s suffering and death for humanity, not for Himself. In Breaking the Waves, Jan asks Bess to suffer for him, and she does, for him. Therefore, she is simply fulfilling his selfish desires, thus diminishing his ultimate redemption. If God had asked Bess to suffer in order to save Jan, the analogy would have at least made some kind of sense. As is, it feels like exploitation, especially since von Trier leaves Bess’s state of mind ambiguous. Does she really have a direct pipeline to God, or is she just hearing voices in her head? Does her purity derive from genuine goodness or childlike naiveté? Is the crucial early shot in which Watson looks directly at the camera and smiles impishly conveying her unbridled joy in love or slyly letting us in on the fact that everything at the core of the film is a big joke?

Philosophical arguments aside, von Trier’s cinematic treatment of the material is fascinating. The year before he made Breaking the Waves, von Trier and fellow Scandinavian director Thomas Vinterberg wrote and signed the Dogme 95 manifesto, which eschewed the artifice of Hollywood production and demanded a strict set of aesthetic rules for filmmaking that involved shooting on handheld video using only natural light and sound in existing locations. Of course, as he is wont to do, von Trier immediately violated his own cinematic vow of chastity with Breaking the Waves, which employs all manner of artifice (computer-enhanced images, postproduction work on the sound, etc.), although its overall effect is one of rough-hewn realism. Cinematographer Robby Müller, a frequent collaborator with Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch, shot the entire film handheld, giving it an immediate, unsteady documentary feel that heightens the reality, almost like viewing someone’s home movies (albeit in the ’Scope aspect ratio). However, that realism is regularly ruptured by von Trier’s decision to break the film into nine chapters, each of which is marked by a one-minute computer-enhanced landscape punctuated with ’70s rock music from the likes of David Bowie, Elton John, Leonard Cohen, and Deep Purple, among others, a decision that feels like postmodern noodling for its own sake.

Although certain scenes succeed with great heart and emotion, and the film is filled with great performances, Breaking the Waves as a whole just does not work for me. It is easy to recognize why critics at the time were so enamored of it, with more than a few stating quite rightly that there was nothing else like it at the time. The film’s mélange of classical European art cinema in the vein of Carl Theodor Dreyer (von Trier’s personal hero) and Ingmar Bergman and the modern aesthetic traits of the video age create a compelling surface that unfortunately cracks apart when asked to support the weight of von Trier’s strange, messy mix of ideas that are either too simplistic or too far-fetched. In the end, von Trier’s notion of depraved sexuality as salvation is illogical and ineffective—contradictory in a way that is irritating rather than thought-provoking, a trait that has defined the majority of his output ever since.

Breaking the Waves Criterion Collection Blu-ray / DVD Combo Set

Aspect Ratio2.35:1
AudioEnglish DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround
Subtitles English
Supplements
  • Selected-scene audio commentary featuring von Trier, editor Anders Refn, and location scout Anthony Dod Mantle
  • New interview with filmmaker and critic Stig Björkman
  • New interviews with actors Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgård
  • Interview from 2004 with actor Adrian Rawlins
  • Excerpts from Watson’s audition tape, with commentary by von Trier
  • Deleted and extended scenes, with commentary by von Trier
  • Cannes Film Festival promotional clip
  • Trailer
  • Insert booklet featuring an essay by critic David Sterritt and an excerpt from the 1999 book Trier on von Trier
  • DistributorThe Criterion Collection
    SRP$39.95
    Release DateApril 15, 2014

    VIDEO & AUDIO
    Long-time viewers of the film will be shocked when they see Criterion’s new transfer of Breaking the Waves, which looks completely different from all of its previous incarnations and is genuinely revelatory. Much was made during the film’s initial theatrical release about von Trier’s process of shooting on film, transferring the image to video, and then transferring the video image back to film, which gave it a decidedly video look even when screened on celluloid (many people, myself included, were initially led to believe that the film had actually been shot on video, rather than Super 35mm). For Criterion’s Blu-ray, von Trier supervised a new transfer that went back to the original camera negative and an internegative, thus eliminating the film-to-video process that determined the image’s look in both the original theatrical release and all subsequent home video presentations. The negative was scanned in 6K resolution and restored at 4K, which provides a wealth of visual information for the eventual 1080p image. The first thing viewers will notice is that the color timing is radically different from previous versions of the film, as the image now veers heavily toward earthy browns and golden hues and no longer looks bright and washed out. The amount of visual detail now apparent in the image, including heavy film grain in some sequences, is stunning, having been retrieved from the film-to-video process that inherently degraded it. In short, Breaking the Waves looks like an entirely different film, and one that frankly looks infinitely better. (I should also note that the version of the film presented here is the original European version, rather than the censored U.S. theatrical version that appeared on Artisan’s 2000 DVD, which removed some of the more sexually explicit content. It also restores David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” during one the chapter stills, which had been replaced by Elton John’s “Your Song” on U.S. video releases.) The lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1-channel soundtrack sounds fantastic. Most of the soundtrack feels monaural, limited almost entirely to the front soundstage, which was von Trier’s intention, so that the stereo music effects of the chapter titles and especially the ending are more pronounced.
    SUPPLEMENTS
    A number of the supplements on Criterion’s Breaking the Waves Blu-ray have appeared elsewhere, but a number of them are new, as well. The selected-scene audio commentary featuring von Trier, editor Anders Refn, and location scout Anthony Dod Mantle, which totals about 45 minutes of running time, originally appeared on a 2003 European DVD release of the film, as did the brief interview with actor Adrian Rawlins, excerpts from Emily Watson’s audition tape, and deleted and extended scenes, the latter of which have optional commentary by von Trier. The cheeky and very brief Cannes Film Festival promotional clip dates back to Criterion’s 1997 laser disc edition of the film. New to Criterion’s disc is an excellent and thoughtful interview with filmmaker and critic Stig Björkman about the film and von Trier’s working methods and new interviews with Watson and Stellan Skarsgård. The insert booklet features an essay by critic David Sterritt and a lengthy excerpt from the 1999 book Trier on von Trier.

    Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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    All images copyright © The Criterion Collection

    Overall Rating: (2)




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