BREAKING THE WAVES

BREAKING THE WAVES ( Written and directed by Lars Von Trier. Starring Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgard, Katrin Cartlidge.)

Lars Von Trier has been criticised in the part for being obsessed with the technique of filmmaking to the detriment of the story and the actors. This is not a complaint that can be made in the case of Breaking The Waves. Not that it doesn’t wear its technique on its sleeve – he has gone to trouble to give the film a grainy, quasi-documentary look

My problems are as follows: 1) Breaking The Waves paints a gruelling portrait of mental illness and serves it up as romance and 2) for a film that stylistically goes out of its way to be “gritty” and “realistic” at the end expects us to suddenly indulge its plunge into fantasy. 3) In a sneaky way it endorses and romanticises senseless martyrdom.

The brilliant Emily Watson plays Bess McNeill – a young woman with a Tam’O’Shanter beret and a Baxter’s Cockaleeky Soup accent – who is a member of a strict Calvinist community in the remote north west of Scotland. Between them her mother (and perhaps her father, though he never appears and we hear nothing about him) and the local Church elders have scrambled her brain and we learn early on that she has already had a couple of trips to a mental hospital in Glasgow. She falls in love with and marries a hulky Scandinavian oil rigger Jan (Skarsgard) – much to the disapproval of the elder lemons and the apprehension of her sister-in-law Dodo (Cartlidge).

When the time comes for Jan to return to the rigs, Bess falls into despair and ups the frequency of her visits to the local kirk where she has long conversations with God (to avoid these degenerating into monologues Bess provides the voice of God herself). Eventually her prayers are answered though not in the way she wanted – Jan returns paralysed from the neck down after an accident on the rig. Things go from bad to worse when, from his hospital bed, he tells Bess that she should go and have sex with other men and tell him about it and that this will keep him alive.

It is never made clear whether Jan is just a nasty piece of work, whether he is genuinely misguided and thinks that Bess needs to sleep with other men and this is the only way she can be persuaded to do it – or whether, as Dodo says, “his brain is scarred and he’s so up to his eyes in drugs he doesn’t know what he is doing.”

The idea is anathema to Bess – but because she is damaged, she obediently grits her teeth and dons her fishnet stockings.

The film draws up with it as it follows Bess’ descent into degradation and danger and her rejection by the ‘righteous’ community. Watson never puts a foot wrong in her brave performance and she is given excellent support by the rest of the cast, particularly Cartlidge, whose character in many ways is the contact point between Bess and the audience. (Dodo is an outsider within the community and she loves Bess while at the same time recognising that she needs help.)

But mesmerising though it may be the crux is this – Bess is presented not as a wildly dysfunctional and distressed woman in dire need of therapy but as a kind of heroic martyr whose ultimate sacrifice results in a miracle. Despite the quality of the writing, the directing and the performance, that seems to me to do her no service at all. (CD)