07.11.1996

Properly utopian

Kevin Watts reviews Breaking the waves, co-written and directed by Lars von Trier

Lars von Trier’s Breaking the waves is a stunning triumph of European cinema. At the heart of the narrative is the dialogue between Bess - an apparently ‘childlike’, painfully open women from an insular Scottish fishing community shaped by a rugged, ascetic Presbyterianism - and her internalised alter ego, god as stern patriarch.

Marriage to ‘outsider’ Jan - an oil rig worker from the profane, encroaching world of the North Sea oil industry - is grudgingly approved by the community male elders, but regarded by Bess literally as a gift of god. For the first time Bess discovers the carnal, embodied pleasures of love with Jan.

Indeed the metaphysic of love is the central theme of a film both funny and harrowing - with Bess’s sexual and transcendent love for Jan inhabiting a space between the puritanical sexual mores of the community that ostracises her and the alienated ‘perversions’ of the sailors who finally kill Bess.

One socialist critic opined that Bess’s “sacrifice” left a bad taste in the mouth. Yet the intent of the film is subtler - Bess’s delusory belief she can revive Jan after he is paralysed in a truly sickening accident on the oil rig by sleeping with any man available conveys both the depth and transgressive character of Bess’s love.

The cinematography lends the film an extraordinary power. The hand-held camera evokes cinéma vérité realism without lapsing into didactic inertia. The sepia processing of the film washes out the compensatory pleasures of colour, heightening the gritty sense of the everyday which gives the film the intimacy, though not the banality, of amateur wedding footage (the film begins with Bess’s marriage to Jan).

Similarly, the 1970s are revealed as our contemporary present, in contrast to the commodified simulacra of Hollywood’s minute projections of, say, 1940s Little Italy, which succeed only in foregrounding the representational artifice at work.

Despite the fact that the overt political vocation of an older realism is absent, the sublime, cathartic ending should not be read as underwriting a specifically mystical or religious conclusion, as some critics believe. Rather the politics of Breaking the waves belong to the avant-garde ideology of marginality. At the same time the marriage of elements of ‘magic realism’ or rather Bunuelesque European surrealism with realism to explore this worldly human love, makes Breaking the waves, like Wenders’ Wings of desire, a profoundly secular and properly utopian film.

Kevin Watts