Breaking the Waves
With Emily Watson, Stellan
Ever since I first encountered Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves in Cannes, where it won the grand jury prize, I’ve been debating within myself about it, because I find it simultaneously shameless, boldly original, contrived, highly affecting, transparent, cynical, hopeful, ironic, sincere, ugly, beautiful, and downright baffling. In a way, my debate isn’t so different from that of Bess (Emily Watson)–the innocent and high strung (or unstrung) young heroine who lives on the northwest coast of Scotland in the early 70s and for much of the film carries on a furious internal debate with “God,” speaking her own part in a squeaky high voice and God’s in a patriarchal low one.
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Part of what’s least Dreyer-like about Breaking the Waves is von Trier’s calculated and postmodernist sense of film reference. Yet the film’s intensity, and therefore its power, is related to its models. In an interview Emily Watson mentions von Trier asking her to study Renee Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and Giulietta Masina in Fellini’s La strada (1954). The grotesque incompatibility of these two models of innocent female suffering–Falconetti’s raw, carnal martyrdom and Masina’s hammy, pop-eyed Harry Langdon imitations–suggests a lack of true respect for either Dreyer or Fellini. But traces of these films are indeed visible in Watson’s performance, so perhaps this dismissal is too hasty. And much as I hate to admit it, my conflicted response to von Trier’s film, my simultaneous desire to denounce and embrace it, is similar to my initial responses to Day of Wrath and Ordet when I was a teenager.
Nonetheless, the cynicism and shameless crudity of von Trier’s plot and dramaturgy make it impossible to consider him seriously alongside Dreyer. (Just as von Trier gets Watson to conflate Falconetti and Masina, he himself conflates Dreyer and another Dane, Douglas Sirk–a cynical soap-opera specialist in Germany and Hollywood who distanced himself from his pile-driver effects with layers and layers of irony–or, perhaps even closer to the mark, Sirk’s sadistic postmodernist disciple of the 70s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who gets even more mileage out of photogenic suffering.)
There are many ways of describing the dialectical relation between these narrative and nonnarrative styles. (The narrative style also contains a dialectic all its own–between the freedom of the shooting style and the brutal interruptions and curtailments of the editing. The shooting style suggests unfettered desire, the editing compulsive behavior–which together express the film’s ambiguity about Bess’s state of mind.) If the narrative style is about action and passion, the nonnarrative style is about meditation, about action and emotion recollected in tranquillity.
I’m far from sharing von Trier’s cynicism, but I think there are many reasons for respecting it, most of them generational. People born before 1950 often had good reason to feel hopeful, at least during the late 60s and 70s; those born later–von Trier was born in 1956–had less and less reason to feel that way. A massive backlash against the earlier generation’s optimism is still going on, an indication of how potent the optimism was. (Evidence of the backlash could be seen in this year’s political campaigns, in which “liberal” was still a dirty word.) Within such a context, a passionate desire to create and even respect a character like Bess–however many stylistic and thematic paradoxes this entails–is clearly a heroic aspiration.
