Lars von Trier’s deadpan-tragic fantasy of emotional pain from 1996 is now re-released as part of a retrospective dedicated to this director; it is magnificently acted, stylishly composed and entirely ridiculous from beginning to end. An operatically extravagant artsploitation ordeal that devastated saucer-eyed audiences at the Cannes film festival, Breaking the Waves won Von Trier the Grand Prix, though missed out on the Palme d’Or. It also launched him as a world-cinema superstar, though it is surely only the blazing passion of his lead Emily Watson that gives this film its substance; she varnishes it with her own luminous talent and commitment. It is perhaps to Watson that Von Trier owes his entire career.
Breaking the Waves is set in a quaintly imagined remote Scottish community in the pre-cellphone era of the 70s and 80s, many of whose menfolk are away for long periods on an oil rig. It is dominated by a fiercely patriarchal, joyless, puritanical and rather Scandinavian-looking church whose elders are in the habit of condemning wrongdoers to hell in special sinners’ burials. The sheer cruelty of these ceremonies is what continues to sweep this film’s fervent audiences away in horror and compassion, perhaps not quite grasping that these appalling events are a figment of Von Trier’s imagination. The director can’t help an unsubtle giggle in the initial burial scene: the sinner being interred is called “Anthony Dod Mantle”, the name of the British cinematographer who went on to shoot a number of celebrated films, including Von Trier’s Dogville and Manderlay.
