Favorite Films: Breaking The Waves
As a Cinema professor one of the first questions that I often get asked by my students is ‘what’s your favorite film?’ As a film lover I find the question frustratingly difficult to answer. How does one begin to narrow down the choices when they include every film ever made? Granted my students only ask me after I’ve put them through the same torture, so I guess it’s only fair. My stock answers are Casablanca and Dancer in the Dark, those typically throw them off. But the real answer is far more complicated and can’t be answered with one or two titles. My favorite films are many and they can’t be ordered based on any criteria. I hold them in high regard for many different reasons. The first of these films is Breaking The Waves, directed by Lars Von Trier and released in 1996.
The first thing I remember about Breaking the Waves was the experience of seeing it. A friend of mine dragged me to this rinky-dink art-house theater in Georgetown, D.C. It was the type of place that you had to go down dark steps and alleyways to get to and the thrill of surviving the excursion without getting mugged was part of the fun. I remember having two different reactions to the film once it was over. The first was that I felt nauseous. I had never seen anything shot entirely with a hand-held camera and the movement made me dizzy. The second was anger. I was angry at the movie, at Von Trier, at my friend for taking me to see it, at Emily Watson who plays the main character of Bess. I was angry.
I probably dismissed it as pornography or trash or something easy without giving it much thought when I discussed it with my friend. But as I was going to bed that night (at 19 years old and meandering through my first year of college), I remember thinking to myself that I had never seen a movie that I felt so strongly about or that evoked such a strong reaction from me. I didn’t know about Dogma, or The Good Woman Trilogy, or anything about Von Trier. All I knew was that Breaking The Waves was different and that made it seem important. It made me want to learn about it and how the film provoked me. I had gone to college to be a journalist for no particular reason, it just seemed like a good choice. That night however, there was a seismic shift somewhere in my brain and my direction changed. The next semester I registered for my first film class and my story goes on from there.
I revisited Breaking The Waves last night. It’s the third time I’ve seen it including that night in 1996. It no longer makes me nauseous, I now take hand-held for granted, but it still makes me angry.
Breaking The Waves takes place in a small coastal town in Scotland. It involves Bess (masterfully played by Emily Watson), a simple-minded woman who marries a much more experienced oilrig worker named Jan. When Jan is paralyzed in a rig accident he coaxes Bess to sleep with other men and then tell him about it. He convinces her that if he forgets what love is like he would die. She does what he asks.
The story uses religion and faith as motivators for Bess’ actions. Bess not only believes in God and talks to him, but he talks back. Literally. Bess closes her eyes and speaks the words of god, to this day I’m surprised that this contrivance passes muster. God tells her to be good and demands that she prove to him how much she loves Jan. Her faith runs so deep that she convinces herself that if she sleeps with these men Jan might be saved. The story quickly sinks into tragedy and despair as Bess’ misguided faith leads her to take more desperate and dangerous action to “save” Jan.
Von Trier would have us believe that this is the story of a saint. That she’s a woman so good that she would sacrifice everything for love. But he confuses things by making Bess dim-witted with a history of mental and emotional illness. Von Trier is constantly begging the question is she a martyr or a victim? Can one be both? If Bess had a normal capacity to reason, would she make the same choices? Perhaps it’s me. I might be too bound by reason to blur the lines between choice and abuse so easily and believe it to be god’s work.
Breaking the Waves remains for me as frustrating to watch as it was the first time. Now I just understand that Von Trier is not interested in providing answers, he just wants to provoke you with questions and situations so vile that they make you want to look away, but you can’t. Not even his mystical conclusion can appease the way you feel about Bess. His resolution doesn’t undo that throughout his narrative, words like woman, fool, martyr, and victim all become synonymous. It’s quite a challenging pill to swallow but that’s also what makes it riveting to watch and it’s certainly what made it so damn unforgettable for me.
Sometimes a Good Notion 