"Breaking the Waves" (1996)
Review by Christopher Roberson
"Breaking the Waves" was one of the most highly praised films of 1996, on many different critics' top 10 lists. I had been unable to see the film in theaters, and was pleased when it became available on video. My eagerness to see it, however, rapidly turned to a sense of betrayal. It turned out to be a cheesy melodrama coated with a thick layer of "artistic" film techniques that rendered it virtually unwatchable. I have never been so disappointed after seeing a critics' favorite, and I think the widespread praise it has received needs to be answered with a dissenting opinion.
Earlier reviews typically provide the basic plot outline, so I'll skip that task. I do reveal some plot secrets, though. I appreciate that some readers may not yet have seen the film, so I have placed the plot-revealing paragraph at the end of the review, flagged in advance.
I'll move (roughly) from the film's best features to its worst. Clearly, its strongest suit is acting. Emily Watson deserved all the praise she received for her outstanding portrayal of Bess MacNeil, a slow-witted young Scottish woman who lives in an appallingly backward fishing village. Whatever else may be problematic about the film, at least this character stands out as fully-conceived and memorable. Also, a word of praise for Stellan Skarsgard, who plays Bess's husband Jan: he takes a severely underwritten role (his character has about ten lines total) and gives a sense of the character's presence and good humor.
I suspect that some critics were impressed by how well Watson took advantage of the histrionic opportunities provided by this role (which called for vomiting, screaming, eye-rolling, and stagey monologues where Bess talks to God, speaking for both herself and The Lord). But I think that Watson comes off well _despite_ the way her role is written: she took a scenery-chewing, meatball role and made the character convincing when it might have been just silly and overwrought. My only major reservation about the performance is her ripe, overdone faux-Scottish accent.
The production techniques also deserve some praise, for inventiveness at least. After being filmed on standard film stock, the image was transferred to video and then back to film. This produces a grainy, washed-out effect, devoid of bright colors or sharp outlines. Although the effect becomes wearisome, for a while it is striking. One is reminded of archival footage from some poverty-stricken Eastern European country, or the murkiness of the images in many of Fassbinder's films.
It seems likely that the director, Lars von Trier, was influenced by Fassbinder in more respects than his cinematography. His screenplay is like some of Fassbinder's, but unfortunately not in a good way. Von Trier seems to have seized on Fassbinder's use of melodrama while missing everything else that makes Fassbinder worth watching. Melodramatic elements are only worth retaining in a work of art if they are handled with sublety, or at least critical distance. Fassbinder was able to pull this off; von Trier doesn't even come close. Many reviews praised the film's "exploration of ideas" (such as the meaning and limits of love and the forms of religious devotion). But the "ideas" in _Breaking the Waves_ could probably be expressed in about three sentences. (Three brief sentences, using words of one syllable.)
Part of the problem is created by the strength and uniqueness of its central character, Bess. She is such an unusual character that many of the film's themes seem tied to her particular circumstances, and difficult to extend to normal people in any convincing way. But the main problem is that most of the characterization is thin and unconvincing. The film is dedicated to telling us how deeply Bess loves Jan, and to what depths she is willing to sink in her devotion to him. It tells us these things, but it never tells us _why_. Bess loves Jan more deeply than anything else, and presumably that's because he is special in some way; but as far as the audience is concerned, Jan is two-dimensional, hard to distinguish from any of the other young male characters. What attracted her to him initially? Why did she fall so deeply in love with him? We never really know. Von Trier doesn't bother to develop Jan's character or the relationship between Jan and Bess. He seems to have thought that long, explicit sex scenes were sufficient; but they're not.
The superficiality of the script becomes more evident as the film proceeds. Astonishingly, some critics seemed to think that von Trier was making a brave statement about sex and love: but his statements are hackneyed, and he aims at easy targets. For instance, he boldly suggests that the church elders of Bess's village, all dour, women-hating Scottish Calvinists, might be wrong about sexual morality and what love really means. When (since Hawthorne, anyway) has this been a shocking or original idea? Who in the audience is likely to side with the church elders? Who would side with them even if von Trier had tried to portray them as anything other than dogmatic, cruel, and hateful? For a film that makes a point of "savaging the drab conformity of community life," there is absolutely no sense of community among these people -- after the first ten minutes, I never had a sense that the villagers related to each other in any way that wasn't directly intended to advance the plot, usually by showing how repressed and judgmental they were.
Even worse than the writing, though, is the cinematography. The director chose to use only hand-held cameras. His aim seems to have been a "cinema-verite feel," but any hint of cinematic realism is constantly undercut by the framing, which includes numerous close-ups and unconvincing camera angles which would never occur in actual cinema verite. Far from being realistic, the camera is constantly calling attention to itself, diverting attention from the actors. One constantly wonders whose perspective the camera work is supposed to capture. Certainly not any of the film's characters. Not the camera operator, either, since this isn't _real_ cinema verite, and the actors never react as if there's a camera present. I'll also rule out the audience, unless the director was trying to reach an audience of people who suffer from neck spasms and tremor. Even scenes without any movement or action never stand still, not for a second.
And then there is the worst aspect of _Breaking the Waves_: the editing. Von Trier's confused notions of cinematic "realism" led him to include gratuitous cuts in the middle of static sequences, for no apparent reason, while eliminating normal shift-of-perspective cuts in other scenes. In the latter scenes, the hand-held camera follows the action with quick, vertiginous pans. The effect, sadly, is not so much realism as nausea. And even this pales when one considers the editing of most of the individual scenes: slack, bombastic, intentionally "arty." In almost every scene, Von Trier seems to have gone out of his way to include tedious extra footage that no one could possibly care about. It is this, above all, that makes _Breaking the Waves_ not just an overwrought melodrama, but a 160-minute-long overwrought melodrama.
I should probably repeat that this film is _two hours and forty minutes long_, and it feels longer. Much longer. Much, much longer. It could easily have been forty to sixty minutes shorter, simply by cutting out extraneous scenes and editing the remaining ones less slackly. One particularly grating element is the inclusion of long, unnecessary "chapter title" sequences (complete with snippets of mediocre early-70s pop songs), which serve both to break up the narrative flow and to drag things out even more.
If you are still interested in seeing the film, you may want to stop reading at this point.
One question that doesn't really fit anywhere else: what the hell does the title mean?
Although the plot is never particularly convincing, it completely unravels in the last twenty minutes. It's bad enough that Jan recovers miraculously from his paralysis after Bess martyrs herself. By golly, she wasn't schizophrenic, she was Really Talking To God. (Perhaps this was one of the "original, challenging ideas" critics mentioned?) But the film tops itself with a jaw-droppingly literal, saccharine conclusion. Early in the film, we are told that Bess's church has no bells; but Bess remarks to a friend that she likes church bells. The final scene, believe it or not, is of bells ringing miraculously in the open sky above Jan's oil rig. We know that the bells are miraculous because we're told that they don't show up on the rig's radar. Yes, that's right, folks: God was on Bess's side the whole time, and now we have proof.
What's particularly depressing is not so much that the film is bad. What's depressing is that it was greeted with rave reviews. This leads me to two pessimistic conclusions. One is that critics are far too willing to overlook artistic bombast if they're captivated by a good performance, or if the film has one or two more ideas than is typical. The other is that von Trier can only have been encouraged by the critical reaction, and is likely to produce something even worse next time. At least when his next film comes out, I'll know in advance that I should avoid it.
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