BREAKING THE WAVES


An OCIC Statement.

Director Lars Von Trier astonished the cinema world by announcing that he had become a Catholic. Opinions were divided about Breaking the Waves. It won the Jury prize at Cannes and was nominated for Oscars. Many Catholic magazines, including Cine & Media, featured it. However, many women found it offensive, a chauvinist view of women, even if Von Trier presented them as saints and martyrs. It was all for the sake of the man (just as in the early Church the male hierarchy honoured women martyrs who were tortured, virgin martyrs who were raped before execution). There is a powerful scene where Emily Watson's Bess is expelled from the church because she did not have uncondition love for the Word of God (she replied in her simplicity that you could not love a word, only a person).

This is a very demanding film to watch as well as to think about and discuss. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes last year and the best European film of 1996. The film, the director and actress, Emily Watson, have won US awards and received many award nominations. However, it is also a film which divides opinions. A number of critics, both men and women, have called it highly mysogenistic and have dismissed it as the chauvenistic storytelling of an eccentric director.

Writer-director, Lars Von Trier, who has recently become a Catholic, is Danish and has made some sombre films about the dark side of European culture like Zentropa and a television min-series parodying hospital soap-operas, The Kingdom. Here he comes into the light but his story is still dark. But it is also strongly religious.

The film's plot would have worked well in the tradition of grim Scandinavian storytelling but, for financial reasons, he has made his film in English and re-set it in Scotland in the early 70s, in a small village, with the sternest of Calvinist religion, which hosts workers on a nearby North Sea oil-rig.

Emily Watson is Bess - and her Oscar-nominated performance is saddenning and moving. She is simple, but has attracted Jan, who works on the rig, and they marry. Bess's story is told in several chapters, beginning happily with the wedding and moving more and more towards tragedy, especially when Jan is severely injured in an accident trying to save a worker.

Here is where the audience begins to have difficulties. What Jan asks of Bess and what she agrees to do is jolting, Bess becoming more and more of a suffering figure, a martyr. The relationships between men and women, the domination of Jan, the loving surrender of Bess and the cruel consequences are ambiguous, to say the least, and really need discussion.

The theme of Bess as martyr is forcefully portrayed as she spends a lot of the film praying, talking to her God (a stern God) but also, in her prayer, speaking what she hears God (sometimes far less stern) saying to her. This confirms that the film is working on the level of a spirituality, but a spirituality that some will identify with (or reject) and that many will find alienating.

During a forum on the film, I heard many people analysing the film as if it were exactly real life or as if it were a report on a current affairs program. If one's response is `realistic', then one misses the nuances of meaning that the film-maker is trying to communicate in images. This is especially true of the ending and the fates of Bess and Jan and the very last pictures and sounds. Not an easy experience, but one worth examining.