by Anne Scallan & Garin V.Dowd
It has been widely pointed out - not least by the director
himself - that Breaking the Waves represents a departure from the concerns both
with form and with cinema history which were the dominant features of the trilogy
which his Epidemic (1984), Element of Crime(1987) and Europa(1991) formed. If
these films did not shy from 'strong' subject-matter (the first film in the
trilogy takes place in a diseased dystopia, the second concerns a series of
child murders, while the third is set in post-war Germany), it is also true
that a stylistic veneer enabled the dazzled viewer to observe the films with
a degree of emotional detachment. A combination of virtuoso camerawork, breathtaking
editing and a dense network of allusion to and quotation from important works
from the history of cinema, produced a heady cinematic brew which bewildered
those who sought in Lars von Trier's work as a 'coherent' moral or political
agenda. They were perhaps even more bewildered when von Trier delivered his
next film, a four-and-a-half-hour, made-for-television hospital drama, which
sent critics flailing for adjectives, most of them reduced to a very-wide-of-the-mark
David Lynchesque ("Don't mention Lynch!," an enraged von Trier
exclaimed in a 'Time Out' interview).
Few, however, having known his filmography, would have
predicted his next feature, Breaking the Waves, a genuine box-office hit and
for many the film which should have won the 1996 Palme d'Or. While the new film
is (undeniably) in many respects a departure for von Trier, it is nonetheless
arguable that Breaking the Waves is entirely coherent with the cinematic principles
of his previous work. The stylistic pyrotechnics, cinephilitic disposition and
subliminal irony which one had come to expect from this iconoclast are not less
but just as evident in Breaking the Waves, if operative at a lower level of
intensity.
That Breaking the Waves got made at all owes as much
to von Trier's commitment to the project as to a computer at the European Script
Fund which selected von Trier's proposal as being the one must likely to be
viable (those elements, the director points out, were a sailor, a virgin and
a romantic landscape - "everything that the computer loved"). The
idea for the film had its genesis in a book read by the director as a child:
'Golden Heart', in which the central character - a Gretel who does not make
it back through he woods - undergoes a version of Christian martyrdom. The tale
is transposed to the west coast of Scotland (various other locations, including
Ireland, were also considered) and into a time-frame marked clearly (excellent
wardrobe and sets, combined with a contemporary rock soundtrack) as the mid-seventies.
Like many fairytales the woods which the central character Bess (the film's
equivalent of Golden Heart) traverses are synonymous with sexuality. Thus the
films startling opening shot (Bess in a wedding dress in a less than romantic
heliport location) announces the nuptials of Bess and an oil rig worker, Jan.
Soon the couple enter a honeymoon idyll (the portrayal of Jan's and Bess's bodies
in their ecstatic coitus is refreshing both in its unhysterical frankness and
its lack of male-gaze-directed voyeurism), which is cut short, first by having
to return to the rig, and, in a brutal denouement, his transportation back to
the mainland after the accident which paralyses him from the neck down. This
pivotal moment takes Bess from the romantic foliage of the periphery of the
film's woods into the dense and dangerous undergrowth of the film's dark interior.
In a bizarre turn of events (the complexity of which we will come to later)
Jan asks Bess to have sexual encounters with other men (otherwise, he says,
he will lose the will to live), which request ultimately leads to her visiting
with prostitutes the ships in the harbour, and on a final trip to her being
raped/beaten/tortured to near death, finally to die in the hospital where Jan
lies still no better for her efforts to adhere to his request.
Much has been made of the fact that Jan asks Bess to have sex with other men and then to tell him about the experiences. It seems, however, that this crucial moment has largely been subject to an overly literalist interpretation. In our view, Jan's request is derived first from his own understanding of the severe Presbyterian community and its religious ethos, and second from his knowledge that to this community and its ethos Bess is incontrovertibly committed. In the light of his paralysis, and especially, of his predicted decline into a possibly vegetative state, Jan wants Bess to have something which the patriarchal and misogynist community to which she belongs will steadfastly deny her. Victim of a repressive religious upbringing and hostage to a virulently misogynist community ethos, Bess will be denied the outlet for her emergent selfhood (the discovery of the pleasures of sex is coterminous with a departure from those strictures) - namely in her relations with Jan. When Dodo tells Jan that Bess will do anything for him , he sees the possibility of helping Bess out of the impasse that looms. Bess and Jan are of course not he first naive protagonists in von Trier's work. We think, for instance of Kessler in Europa who wants to show the Germans that "not everyone hates them". But we also think of the strangely omniscient Down's Syndrome dishwashers in The Kingdom. Two sides of von Trier's 'take' on individual responsibility and the possibility of ethico-political action. For von Trier, it seems, power is everywhere, and traverses the entire social spectrum. Thus in Breaking the Waves, power is operative not only in the monolith of the kirk, but also within the enclave of the individual. Thus Bess is not simply a victim of the kirk and all that it stands for: she actively contributes to it; she is committed to it. Thus Jan (naively) thinks he is empowering Bess, whereas in fact the trajectory he establishes for her becomes - as she blindly follows it, still believing in a divine theology - not a line of escape but a vector of abolition. Power, therefore, does not simply inhere in, and is not simply deployed from, a centre which is to be criticised (That doesn't interest me. That's far too simplistic", von Trier has said). In this respect von Trier's work has certain affinities with the work of Kafka in literature and with the theories of Michel Foucault in philosophy (which space prevents us from exploring further here). Power is deployed throughout a complex network, and is through these 'woods' that our latter day Golden Heart struggles, becoming, like the latter less, not more, empowered as she does.
The remainder of this article can be found in Film West 27