Breaking The Waves

The Danish director Lars von Trier describes Breaking The Waves as ‘a simple love story.’ Which is a little like calling The Passion of Christ a courtroom thriller. Set in the early ’70s in a humble village perched on Scotland’s rugged northern coast, von Trier’s first English-language feature is a powerful religious allegory about an innocent young woman whose effusive goodness collides with the wider world.

Raised in a small, puritanical Calvinist community, Bess (the superb, disarming Emily Watson) is a solitary spot of warmth and passion in a brutally cold place. With the reluctant permission of the severe church elders, Bess marries Jan (Stellan Skarsgård), a good-natured lug who works on a North Sea drilling platform. After a brief spell of playful erotic discovery, the story takes a tragic turn: Jan is paralyzed in an accident. Bed-ridden, he urges Bess to date other men, but only when he suggests that these relationships can somehow make him well does she embark on a series of degrading sexual encounters. Her protective sister-in-law (Cartlidge) tries to intervene, to no avail. A woman so deeply religious she carries on intimate conversations with God, Bess sacrifices everything to save her husband.

Robby Müller’s cinematography has a washed-out quality, as if all the colour had been beaten out of the film by those relentless waves of the title, and his hand-held camera is an anxious witness, lending the tale a sense of imminent chaos. With a film as transcendent as it is brutal, von Trier offers up a tale of modern-day martyrdom to rival the tribulations of the saints.

– Aaron Gell, Time Out New York