BREAKING THE WAVES
A film review by Dave Cowen
Copyright 1996 Dave Cowen
At the end of each episode of his television show THE KINGDOM, Lars Von Trier appeared as a presenter, dressed in his dapper best, offering a teaser for the next show with the most smirking and derisive expression imaginable. Von Trier's appearances were my favorite part of THE KINGDOM -- it was as if he was goading the more naive viewers in the audience lest some would take his fantastic modern-day ghost story seriously. Von Trier doesn't show up at the end of BREAKING THE WAVES, but I envision him standing there, chortling to himself: with this new film, Von Trier has created a completely indefensible, illogical and incredibly badly shot video which through the assistance of art-film cliches, overacting and an strangely audience-pleasing ending is playing in movie theaters to four-star reviews around the world. If you see BREAKING THE WAVES and enjoy it, you're being mocked. If you've seen BREAKING THE WAVES and disliked it, you've wasted your money. Both ways, it's not worth seeing under any circumstance.
[This review contains extremely major spoilers, separated at the end from the rest of the text.]
If Lars Von Trier were a beginning director, it would be possible to see BREAKING THE WAVES as a bold and audacious beginning revealing a hidden talent. Unfortunately, Von Trier has already proven his talent: 1991's EUROPA (ZENTROPA in the United States) is a technically and thematically outstanding film, full of breathtaking visual effects, tight editing and wonderfully subdued emotional performances -- which unfortunately went unnoticed in most film markets. While his earlier feature-length film THE ELEMENT OF CRIME lacked as strong a thematic backbone, some of its imagery was similarly striking and revolutionary. In BREAKING THE WAVES, however, a hand-held video camera captures the action on the screen, yielding grainy, out-of-focus shots which would not seem out of place in the video library of any camcorder owner's. The editing of the video is equally jittery, often making arbitrary jump cuts to scenes which provide no action, or the same actor reciting different dialog. The film opens on a title card (which, in standard Von Trier fashion has Von Trier's name larger than the name of the film itself) while the camera shakes and wobbles -- literally, any home movie enthusiast could shoot a video with more grace and stability than this one. Then as if to poke fun at the blatantly amateurish production values, Von Trier mattes the video in the widescreen Cinemascope aspect ratio and divides each section of the story with an richly colored and beautifully animated title-card.
Emily Watson's performance as the dim Bess has been universally praised for the simple reason that Watson takes very basic emotions and projects them for miles, turning a smile into a full-blown wide-eyed gape and a frown into a shreiking fit of self-loathing. Her performance is so ridiculously overstated that it's difficult to give her character any credulity: one thinks while watching the film not so much about what her character is feeling, but how hard Watson is trying to project the raw emotions that the character is supposed to be showing. Katrin Catrlidge and Adrian Rawlins, on the other hand, offer extremely fine performances as Bess' sister-in-law and doctor -- Rawlins especially does a very good job of minimizing some of Watson's overstatement. The rest of the cast are also believable, creating a strong counterpoint to Watson's overexaggerated performance of Bess.
The story of BREAKING THE WAVES is one linking spirituality and sexual abuse. The video begins when good-spirited but slightly crazy Bess marries Jan, an oil-rig worker on holiday, and enjoys her newly found sexuality. When Jan leaves to work on the rig, Bess prays to her God to bring him back (Watson plays both parts, intoning God's words with a lower-pitched tone) and gets her wish, although not as she intended. Jan is brought back to town after being hit on the head, and is paralyzed: doctors expect Jan to live, but to never walk again. While in the hospital, Jan asks Bess, in order to help him feel better, to go out and perform sexual acts with the local men. Bess begrudgingly obliges him, allowing men to abuse her sexually more and more as she believes that her actions will cause God to heal Jan in return for her own selfless acts.
Further discussion of the story continues below, underneath the spoiler warning.
[SPOILERS]
What is shocking is that in the epilogue of the film, Von Trier affirms Bess' faith: Bess dies, Jan appears on crutches, and church bells ring from the heavens. This would,on first thought, to seem offensive to all parties watching the film. I would imagine that those watching the video from a religious background would be offended by the idea that the road to salvation is forged through acts of abusive sex, and that those watching the video from a less faithful background would be put off by Von Trier's quite literal portrayal of God. I'd be wrong, however, and here's why:
In fashioning his film, Von Trier has created a pornographic fantasy which the average moviegoer would never have the "decency" to rent outside the trappings of an art film: when you take this production on its literal level, a story shot on video about a woman who is forced to perform sexual acts with random men, it sounds (and occasionally looks) like the kind of film you'd rent in the back room in your local video store and not see at your local art theater. However, by making the individual forcing Bess to have sex God, and by making the reward for these actions the survival of her lover and a place in heaven, Von Trier makes Bess' demise through absusive sexual acts carry an air of false nobility. But what nobility? In the real world, regardless of one's take on spirituality, anyone with half a brain knows that Bess' actions would do nothing but get her killed. This is sleazy, sleazy stuff here. "Make the main character act out of a selfless notion to a higher power," Von Trier seems to be saying, "and the audience will watch anything." The viewer can have it both ways, being titillated by the boyish sexual fantasies in the film while feeling righteous by agreeing with the spiritual elements and sympathies with Watson's easily understood performance at the same time -- even when these parts of the film's narrative don't logically hold together. A test of a viewer's hypocracy, perhaps?
After Von Trier's EUROPA lost to (the admittedly superior) BARTON FINK at the Cannes film festival, Von Trier gave the Cannes jury "the finger." Now, after releasing EUROPA, which astounded on visual and spiritual levels and that film going nowhere in the cinematic world, Von Trier has taken the ultimate revenge on the movie-going public by making a deliberately poor film which is designed to be a smash on the art-film scene: I really could see Von Trier giving the finger and chortling at the audience throughout every frame in the film^H^H^H^Hvideo. It's a brilliant guerilla tactic -- but please excuse me for being a bit upset after paying 7 dollars for the experience.
Signed: ESCHATFISCHE, david h t t p : / / w w w . f i s c h e . c o m (esch@fische.com) -------------------------------------------------------
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