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.
Watson is generous and gentle in the role of Bess, a beautiful, childlike young woman who regularly cleans the church and in private has weird, ventriloquised conversations with God there. But she suffers from depression and has already been hospitalised with a breakdown after the death of her brother Sam, who was married to Dodo (Katrin Cartlidge), a local nurse who is now Bess’s fiercely protective best friend. To the unease of her straitlaced family, Bess is getting married to oilrigger Jan (Stellan Skarsgård), a boozy, rough-mannered guy but with humour, honesty and intelligence; he is deeply in love with her and sees her qualities in a way that her uptight family do not.
Then when Jan is paralysed following an accident on the rig, he asks Bess to have sex with strangers and then come back to his bedside to tell him so that they can be psychically intimate. And poor vulnerable Bess, in a kind of Magdalen sacrifice, does so, her encounters becoming ever more reckless, believing that her sexual martyrdom will physically cure Jan.
Like all of Von Trier’s films, Breaking the Waves is a kind of hoax or prank, a superbly engineered and detailed windup, manipulating audiences with lethal control and ingenuity – particularly those febrile international audiences at Cannes, which for over a quarter of a century has been his launchpad (apart from the seven-year ban that followed his expression of sympathy for Hitler). And it sometimes dispenses with narrative believability entirely: Bess is at one stage sectioned under the Mental Health Act, but escapes from two police officers accompanying her to Glasgow … and then, well, the police just seem to forget about the whole thing and she comes back to her home village.
Von Trier attempted again to put a woman through a similar preposterous ordeal in Dancer in the Dark in 2000, starring Björk, a very much less talented actor (who went on to lodge her own #MeToo complaint about Von Trier’s behaviour). For me, the latter film was an out-and-out embarrassment, a film in which Von Trier’s hoax aesthetic had nothing to recommend it – although it actually won both the Palme d’Or and best actress at Cannes, awards which should have gone to Breaking the Waves.
But even as a longtime Von Trier unbeliever, I have to concede the force with which Breaking the Waves is delivered. It is shot with fluency and energy; the dreamy chapter-heading inserts are striking, the final image is powerful, and of course Watson herself is a triumph. And even Von Trier’s patent insincerity and facetiousness could be read as a satire on movie emotionalism, or as its own kind of conceptual art. Either way, it’s quite an experience.
• Breaking the Waves is released on 4 August in UK cinemas.
