Breaking the Waves

Obscure to say the least, Danish director Lars Von Trier's last movie, The Kingdom, was released in the UK in a print running to just under five hours. While Breaking the Waves, at just over two-and-a-half hours, still requires dedicated viewing, patient viewers will be rewarded with what must certainly be one of the best films of the year, if not the decade. It is an astonishing film in many ways with a rare power which touches and moves the human spirit.

Central to its strength is newcomer Emily Watson's incredible portrayal of Bess, a naive girl from a remote Scottish community who is moved to extremes by love for her new husband (Stellan Skarsgard). When he is paralysed in an accident on the oil rig where he works, realising they will never be lovers again, he persuades her to find sensual passion elsewhere. In the belief that this will aid his recovery, Bess's impressionable young mind becomes convinced that she can save Jan's life with a miracle. But the community here is as barren as the landscape, and the ensuing tragedy is devastating. On the screen for a large part of the film, Emily Watson's face details the minutiae of joy and despair and carries you with it.

Lars Von Trier has brought a rare literary quality to Breaking the Waves which comes from much more than just having divided the film into chapters. There is a textural depth here and an intimacy of portrait that the two-and-a-half hours allows, but which nonetheless seems more literary than cinematic. Coupled with a fiercely intellectual examination of God, the Church and morality, Breaking the Waves echoes the haunting spiritual unease found in The Kingdom. With its refinement of those ideas and its shift in style, to watch Breaking the Waves is to witness a moment of great art.

Reviewed by Monika Maurer