Breaking the Waves. - movie reviews

National Review, Dec 23, 1996 by John Simon

Breaking the Waves, by the Dane Lars von Trier, won the Jury Prize at Cannes. If you believe in miracles -- which might include von Trier making a sane movie -- this could be the film for you. Bess, a sweet Scottish lass in a harbor town some twenty years ago, marries Ian, a macho Scandinavian oil-rig worker. They consummate their marriage in a lavatory, and all would be wonderful if Ian didn't have to be back on the job so soon. Bess has intimate conversations with God, requesting the prompt return of her husband. And back he comes, owing to a horrible accident that leaves him paralyzed, bed-ridden, and at death's door.

Ian proceeds to persuade Bess that, for his sake, she must have sex with another: this, he tells her gallantly, will cure him if only she keeps relating her sexual experiences to him. She resists at first, but love prevails. Bess becomes the strict Calvinist town's whore as she seeks out more and more brutal, indeed sadistic, affairs with men from the ships that put in at the harbor. When, as the press kit delicately puts it, she "plunges into the ultimate sacrifice," a whopping double miracle takes place.

Von Trier uses a handheld camera that must have become glued to its operator's hands. The most ordinary indoor scenes are shot so as to make you feel you're on a stormy ocean crossing and you've run out of Dramamine. Also, for no particular reason, the film is in chapters. Each chapter begins with a computer-generated quasi-landscape painting in which elaborate time and weather changes are compressed into one minute each. These artsy minutes seem almost longer than the hours of the rest of the film, in which the nonmiraculous sequences are no more believable than the miracles.

Emily Watson is touching as Bess, and Katrin Cartlidge is equally fine as her devoted sister-in-law. Stellan Skarsgard, as Ian, is appropriately bearish when vertical, and wheedling when horizontal. In the part of the chief pervert, pretty boy Udo Kier is, for once, properly cast. Robby Mueller is a master cinematographer, but visual bravura at the service of narrative and psychological absurdity becomes a case of packaging over substance. The film's score is an anthology of garish Seventies pop, with a prestigious sprinkling of Bach. I am not quite sure what is meant by the title, Breaking the Waves, but after seeing the film, I can tell you all about stretching patience to the breaking point.