A movie, according to Danish writer-director and ex-wunderkind Lars Von Trier, should be like a stone in your shoe. His latest film, released on video this week, is called Breaking the Waves and it fits the description perfectly. Breaking the Waves won the Grand Prix at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar nomination for its lead actress Emily Watson, and has generated a lot of critical acclaim. My reaction was viscerally contrary: I thought Breaking the Waves was designed to make me feel like I was having nails driven through my feet.
The struggle between style and substance is never very far from the surface of Von Trier’s work—and consequently the surface is unfortunately never very far from anything else. This is not a problem in a film like 1991’s Zentropa—which won both a Special Jury Prize and the backhand-complement ‘Grand Prix de la Technique’ at Cannes. Zentropa is pure Cannes-bait; a calling card for its maker as the most terrible enfant of them all, and it succeeds at every level it deigns to pursue—mainly superficial politics and deep flashiness.
The pursuit of deep flashiness is a problem in a work like Breaking the Waves, which stakes out tougher ground: Von Trier is chasing a Christian metaphor here; a parable of faith, piety and redemption, none of which have ever reared their heads in his work before. In a 1995 interview he let on that he might not have the appropriate tools for the job: “With Breaking the Waves, we are treading on the verge of kitsch—it’s melodrama’s answer to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”
Unfortunately, that’s an apt description of the movie. Breaking the Waves tells the unhappy story of Bess, a simple and pious soul from a tight, religious Scottish community with little of the congeniality that Bill Forsyth found there in films like Local Hero and Comfort and Joy. Indeed, you might call this Severe and Joyless: Bess is looked at with extreme suspicion by the community elders when she marries a Scandinavian oil-rigger rather than one of the young men from her own town. Isolated and extremely lonely, she prays one day for her new husband’s speedy return from the North-Sea oilfields, and gets her wish in the most terrible way possible: he has an accident and comes back paralysed and on the edge of death.
For reasons that are hard to remember after the fact, Bess’s husband asks her to indulge in a strange regimen of morale-boosting: she is to take on a series of lovers and then describe the goings-on to him; in a perverse way, she’ll really be making love to him, and that will keep him alive. That at least is the theory.
The gimmick is that it seems to work: she picks up guys; he gets better. After a while, she notices that she doesn’t even have to tell him about her trysts; it is as if merely through her self-sacrifice and self-debasement the mercy of the lord shines upon her husband.
It’s around this point—perhaps even earlier, depending on just how committed you are to a religious vision based on sacrifice and degradation—that Breaking the Waves starts to unravel; that a religious film in the tradition of Ingmar Bergman and Von Trier compatriot Carl Theodore Dreyer morphs ominously into a religious film as given us by Cecil B. DeMille.
Bess’s behavior naturally gets the community up in arms; she is persecuted and abused, and we are shown that her faith is pure as the driven Ivory Snow while the village’s is ring-around-the-collar corrupt. Ultimately, she makes her way to a personal Calvary where, Christ-like, her sacrifice redeems the one she loves. Even if you do believe in God, the final frames of Breaking the Waves are pretty hard to take—Frank Capra does The Passion of Joan of Arc. There is a big, ugly barrier reef lurking at the end of Breaking the Waves and Lars Von Trier crashes into it, taking all hands down with him.
The video archive provides a happier prospect. Virtually all the Von Trier that matters is available, and that amounts to two films: the aforementioned Zentropa (a real treat if you’ve got a big screen and hi-fi, or better yet, a rep. cinema showing it up the block) and The Kingdom, a 4 1/2 hour project for Danish television which, along with Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, is perhaps the best TV miniseries ever made.
Described by dust-jacket publicists desperate for North American reference points as a combination of E.R. and Twin Peaks, The Kingdom is a apocalyptic, occultish medical drama set in a decaying, byzantine Copenhagen hospital. It is not the most heroic of places: a malingering patient fakes symptoms so she can conduct seances for the patients; a doctor who has taken up residence in the basement runs a black market in vital goods and keeps a mock graveyard of patients killed by incompetent surgeons; the ghost of a child murdered years ago haunts an elevator shaft; and so on and so on—two dishwashers with Down’s syndrome periodically pop in to keep the audience informed about just what is going on.
The Kingdom is probably the best introduction to Lars Von Trier’s work—it is certainly the most flat-out enjoyable—and it reveals in Breaking the Waves a spiritual wrong turn in the career of someone more suited to social satire. The Kingdom displays a variety of spirituality more in line with its creator’s talents: we live our lives surrounded by spirits all right; but this time they’re pissed off and determined to give us grief. Rather like the director himself.
—Published in the Globe and Mail, 1996
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