Cast: Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgaard

Director: Lars von Trier

Screenplay: Lars von Trier

Running time: 2 hrs 36 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


Danish cinematic iconoclast Lars von Trier’s first English-language film Breaking the Waves subverts the genre of romantic melodrama (read: women’s weepie) into something entirely on its own. A tragedy filmed in a quasi-documentary, home-video look washed out of any primary colours into monotonous shades of sepia, bleak browns and unfiltered light. A sweeping romance worthy of a Wuthering Heights (here it’s the windswept Scottish highlands), yet does not easily offer some stiff vertical morals from its central protagonists. Like the title, this breaks genre definitions and surf in the wave of the iconoclasm of cinema. After all, von Trier is one of the progenitors of the famous Dogme 95 Manifesto. Although steeped with Dogme principles, Waves isn’t officially a Dogme film (Von Trier’s follow-up The Idiots was his first entry to the manifesto), but it’s easy to recognise the techniques in this pre-movement work: raw style, handheld cameras, less artifice, more realism. Basically, a big two-finger to Hollywood. There are even instances throughout the film when the heroine, Emily Watson’s Bess, surreptitiously and swiftly looks into the camera, as though glancing to her audience. It allows a self-conscious performance, and what a performance it is. Count Emily Watson’s rendition of a good-hearted, small-town, virginal Scottish lass as one of the finest debut screen acting by any actor committed to celluloid. And put it up there with Björk in also Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark as simultaneously naturalistic and heartbreaking.


Here Von Trier explores religion, guilt, redemption and the all-consuming power of love. Watson’s Bess is suddenly thrown into an off-kilter world of dissipated behaviour in the eyes of her local church pulpit community when her paralysed husband asks her to sleep with other men to fulfil her sexual liberation. It’s a cringingly weird set-up, but both Watson and Skargaard’s chemistry make us understand their situation. Sacrifice ensues and Bess commits herself to what seem to be self-humiliation all for the name of redemption and healing. And like real life, more or less, only very little is healed.


VERDICT:

Von Trier does not settle for comfort viewing. He undertakes religion, guilt, redemption, sex and the all-consuming power of love in what might be a muddled affair. But it makes sense, and it’s told with daring, panache and power. Watson’s superb performance should be in the history books of screen acting.



RATING: A-