JONATHAN ROMNEY has fallen in love with Breaking the Waves, Lars von Trier’s powerful new film about the absurdity and grandeur of lust
NO FILM I saw last year has held me in its grip quite so hard as Lars von Trier’s Breaking The Waves. Given that your average critic sees upwards of 400 films a year, this isn’t all that easy.
Breaking the Waves throws conventional story-telling and even logic out of the window and substitutes pure, if not entirely unadulterated, passion. And that includes the way it is made. If you don’t see it, you will miss one of the cinematic events of the year.
But then, the film does come from Lars von Trier. Ever since The Element of Crime, his first feature, he has tried so hard to amaze that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, for him, film constitutes some kind of consuming alter ego.
It doesn’t always work. Europa appeared all style and no real content. His massive The Kingdom, which will now be followed by The Kingdom II, was a hospital drama that made Casualty look like a vicarage tea party but somehow could never be taken seriously.
Breaking The Waves is different: the way it is made convincingly serves the emotion it generates. We are not just astonished; we are also made to feel, thanks to the performance Von Trier extracts from the virtually unknown British actress Emily Watson, who plays the lead character.
Watson holds the screen for practically the whole film, and I can’t think of anyone who more deserves an Oscar.
The film is in English and Watson plays Bess, a young woman living in a remote Scottish fishing village who marries Swedish actor, Stellan Skarsgard’s Jan, a bluff oil-rig worker. The Presbyterian elders are ranged against her and, as a deeply religious woman, Bess is not comforted by their disapproval. Only her best friend and sister-in-law, played by Katrin Cartlidge, supports her.
The marriage, however, prospers. Introduced to the joys of sex, Bess blossoms. But Jan’s return to the rigs casts her into purgatory. She promises God that she will give anything for his return. He replies by sending Jan back paralysed after an appalling accident.
Drugged to the hilt, he suggests she take a lover. She takes him at his word and begins her long descent into hell.
Does Jan do this to force himself towards a cure through jealousy, or to ensure that his hitherto faithful wife lives a full life? We are never sure, though Von Trier tells us that this story is not about good or evil but about love, which in Bess’s case consumes her utterly.
There is a moral dimension, though. Whatever she does and however unbalanced she seems, Bess is on the side of the angels in spirit, and if the Scots elders who haunt the community are not evil, I don’t know who is. The weight of the film supposes that if the blessed are to triumph on earth, it will be a hard task. They are more likely to be driven mad.
The film – shot by Robby Muller, who has made so many good films better and bad ones sufferable – is on widescreen but was made almost entirely with hand-held cameras.
Some may find this almost physically up- ending, and it is certainly unnerving. But it transforms a realist pose into something more. Even the wedding sequence looks extraordinary, and both Bess’s sexual pleasure and the grief that follows are given an extrasensory kick.
Between the action, von Trier places chapter headings and calming shots of the beautiful landscape, accompanied by Seventies hit songs that seem to tell us there’s a more normal, comforting world outside.
Otherwise, the huge and insistent close-ups draw the most from the actors. Skarsgard and Cartlidge in particular are excellent. As for Watson, she is superb, showing us both the desperation of love and the terrible vulnerability of faith.
Strangely, perhaps, this is not a depressing film. It affirms, albeit queasily, that whatever is done to it, the human spirit tends in the end to triumph.
But what also makes it moving is that the emotions on display, though highly coloured and at times melodramatic, ring so true.
Goodness knows whether audiences will believe in Von Trier’s equating love with what Bess does in its name, or even with what her stricken husband seems to ask of her. There is an absurdity round the edges of this tale that you can’t deny. But there’s also a grandeur that transcends it. It’s a triumph of cinematic flair, injected with a belief in what it lays out before us. In this, Breaking the Waves has the force of Carl Dreyer, Von Trier’s great Danish predecessor. You can’t give higher praise than that.
Breaking the Waves is on at the Jameson Cannes Film Festival in Cape Town on March 21. It opens on national art circuit on April 25