Breaking the waves is a movie by the Danish director Lars Von Trier. It is his first English movie after making several very successful and thought-provoking films in his native language. The movie was made in 1996 and was written by Lars Von Trier along with Peter Rasmussen.
Stellan Skarsgard, Emily Watson, Udo Kier, Katrin Carlidge and others star with Skarsgard and Watson playing the main roles of Jan Nyman and Bess McNeill respectively.
The movie begins with Bess McNeill (Watson) helping out at a local church in Scotland. She belongs to a very strict and ultraconservative Calvinist community which shuns all forms of worldly love and distrusts anyone outside the community.
It is of little wonder that when Bess wants to marry Jan Syman(Skarsgard), an oil rig worker, she meets with a lot of opposition from her community leaders. Jan arrives at the village on leave accompanied by his roughneck friends and they seem to be the only ones having a good time at the wedding.
Jan fulfills his conjugal obligation in a bathroom and this scene is important to understanding the relationship between Jan and Bess and Bess’s sexual naivete/curiosity when she asks Jan to ’’love her’’ even in a setting like that.
Soon Jan has to depart for the oil rig and Bess prays for him to return earlier than scheduled. The film shows the character of Bess as being a child-woman, with her religious fervor involving conversations with God.
Jan does return from the rig earlier than expected, after an injury paralyses him from the neck down. Bess shows her intense love and faith in him by devoting herself to his care. Jan requests Bess to have sexual encounters with other men and describe the sexual act to him.
Bess is horrified at his request initially, but accedes to his request out of love for him and her belief that self-sacrifice will move God to cure Jan. For some reason her sexual degradation starts acting like a panacea to Jan and he begins to become healthier. A scene where she is sobbing uncontrollably shows her repulsion for what she’s doing but her faith in Jan and her God overcomes her shame of betrayal.
The movie takes a somewhat unexpected turn at the end and for that alone it is worth going through some scenes which seem to be a bit of a drag. The director shot this movie with minimal equipment preferring to use handheld cameras and offsetting the somewhat home video atmosphere with glorious scenes of the Scottish landscape which appear at the start of each chapter in the movie.
The soundtrack is phenomenal with songs like ’’Child in Time’’ by Deep Purple, ’’Hot Love’’ by T-Rex, ’’Cross-Eyed Mary’’ by Jethro Tull, ’’Siciliana’’ by Bach among others. Personally I would have preferred ’’Astronomy’’ by Blue Oyster Cult instead of ’’Hot Love’’ at the beginning of one of the chapters, but the director knows better.
The film on the whole is very weird, raw and offbeat, but very well done with a rebellion against abstracting stark reality with nuances. My friend who watched the movie told me that it reminded him of a line from Les Miserables ’’To love another person is to see God’’. It shows the difference between oppressive religion and free will.
I enjoyed the movie but was disturbed when I reflected on it and would not recommend it to people who are in a less than healthy state of mind. It is a true successor to Lars Von Trier’s movie ’’Europa’’. It earned Emily Watson an Academy Award nomination.