BREAKING THE WAVES
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
(October) Starring: Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgaard, Katrin Cartlidge, Adrian Rawlins. Screenplay: Lars von Trier. Producers: Vibeke Windelov, Peter Aalbaek Jensen. Director: Lars von Trier. MPAA Rating: R (nudity, sexual situations, profanity, drug use, violence). Running Time: 166 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Early in Lars von Trier's shattering new drama BREAKING THE WAVES, there is a scene in which Bess MacNeill (Emily Watson), an innocent young woman living in a coastal Scottish town, is deflowered by her husband Jan (Stellan Skarsgaard) in a bathroom at their wedding reception. It is the kind of situation you might have seen before played for laughs in low-brow comedies, usually because one of the parties in the bathroom is not the bride or the groom. In one astonishing moment, however, von Trier shows that he is not going to take you anywhere you have been before, allowing his hand-held camera to linger on the face of a woman whose reaction is nothing as simple as lust or anxiety. It is nothing less than awe at the overpowering emotions of making love for the first time which plays out before us, and introduces us to one of the most utterly fascinating film characters I have ever seen, played by an actor of unbelievable range.
Ladies and gentlemen, please meet Emily Watson, and do yourselves the favor of remembering that name. It is true that she has been given the kind of role which most actors (particularly women) would commit several felonies for -- a fragile, unstable woman who risks the censure of her strict Calvinist community in pursuing her love for lusty outsider Jan -- but Watson brings to it the kind of performance which doesn't so much impress you as transport you. When we first see Bess kneel in prayer to God, only to hear her play both roles in a dialogue, it is startling and disturbing, and makes her somewhat pitiable; later, when Bess finds herself unable to summon God's voice, it is somehow just as terrible. Watson is as gloriously innocent touching male genitalia for the first time as she is anguished when Jan leaves to return to the offshore oil rig on which he works. There is not an emotion she does not touch, or which does not leave you fumbling for superlatives.
Watson is so good that her performance might overwhelm a lesser story made by a lesser film-maker, but BREAKING THE WAVES is no simple love story. Much of the action takes place after an accident on the oil rig renders Jan paralyzed, a tragedy to which he responds by asking Bess to have sex with other men and describe the encounters to him. That storyline alone would make BREAKING THE WAVES a risky venture, but von Trier takes it to another level of audacity by making it an exploration of love and religious faith at its most extreme. As Bess gradually descends into a world of degraded sexuality she can't possibly understand, von Trier begins to build up imagery which suggests Bess as a Christ figure. She experiences her own agony in the garden as she pleads to have her burden taken away; she is condemned by the religious elders of her community; she is first betrayed, then shunned, by those closest to her; she even undergoes her own Way of the Cross, pelted with stones by a group of kids. It is powerful, resonant, and not a little bit sacrilegious.
And BREAKING THE WAVES is nearly as likely to offend those of a liberal sensibility as those more conservatively inclined. It would be easy to recoil against the idea of a woman with a history of mental illness subjected to violence and indignity by her own husband and, perhaps, even God. Those whose knees would jerk at the mere notion of a woman who would sacrifice anything for her man are going to have major problems with BREAKING THE WAVES, yet the film's indescribable final shot may address outrage on both sides with wordless daring: our earthly notions of good and evil, of right and wrong, may be burdens that only a simple mind motivated only by love can overcome in order to know the will of God.
BREAKING THE WAVES, at once intellectually challenging and emotionally draining, is presented by Lars von Trier in a visual style he also used in THE KINGDOM, a film-to-video-to-film trick which renders everything a dirty brown. The day-to-day world is a bleak thing in BREAKING THE WAVES, but between the chapters in the film are hypnotic motion-postcards (computer manipulated by artist Per Kirkeby) which provide surges of hope. That structure, along with the jittery photography, are as much a key to the title of BREAKING THE WAVES as anything which occurs in the film. Lars von Trier takes his audience for a ride on a sea of emotions which cannot leave it unmoved. Love it or loathe it, you will not be able to ignore BREAKING THE WAVES, or the work of Emily Watson as a woman who proves that love is a mighty power.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 permanent waves: 10.
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