Breaking the Waves

MOVIE #1,158 •🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿• 09.21.23 RANKING LARS VON TRIER: #2 [Ed. Note: This was the first film I watched for this Ranking series. Sorry that the tone of this review is so different than the others. I'm not sure what I was going for.] And so I begin a crisscross through the career of Lars Von Trier. Hey that rhymes! Neat. And fun. You know what’s not so fun, it seems? Watching a dang Lars Von Trier film! I am beginning with Trier’s Golden Heart Trilogy (1996-2000) of which this is the first installment. I am starting here for no real reason, but maybe the real reason is because I remember when Bjork wore that swan dress to the Oscars. (I don’t want to explain that sentence further. I’m sorry.)

Before dipping my toes into the Trieriverse, the only thing I knew about his work is that it was BLEAK. And, guess what? We are 1 for 1 on that count, man. Hoo boy… NOT a feel-good movie here, folks. There are around 15 features and some TV, documentaries and shorts I will be ingesting over the next five to fifty-five weeks (give or take). Whether my precious heart can take it… that’s another question.

I like to mix up how I ingest a filmmaker’s catalog. Sometimes I’ll go chronolog, sometimes rev-chronolog, sometimes alphabetty and then sometimes I’ll just throw out a dang wildcard and jump around like I’m in the Irish hip-hop group House of Pain. That Trier (or is it Von Trier–I mean, I assume Von isn’t his middle name?) often works in loose trilogical way, I thought it would be nice to start somewhere in the middle and then hop frontwards and backwards, making sure I took in each trilogy in chronological order, of course. It’s a joy: being able to experience an auteur’s work in full, for the first time (unscathed as it were… something about it feels more pure).

But that’s enough preamble, let’s talk about 1996’s Breaking the Waves starring the great Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgård. This film is a classic, me thinks. Like many great works of the cinema, it plays a trick. This movie’s trick is that it makes you think it’s about sex, but it’s really about faith and religion. It’s about what an absolute farce the latter is. (And I believe this is a common theme for him. We pick things up in life by happenstance, without really trying — I do, at least.)

This film is long, but it’s broken down by Chapters which make it easily digestible in multiple viewings (umm, ever heard of PRESTIGE TV??) . All the Chapters begin with a classic rock song, by David Bowie and others, played over these extremely cool looking. kind of moving portraits (done by Per Kirkeby). I did a supercut of these title cards…


My favorite part(s) of this movie are when Emily Watson does the voice of God. It’s a reoccurring bit and it’s so so good…


I found an interesting secondary theme to be the role of women in modern society. Yes, the pretense of the setting (a cloistered village in bumfuck Scotland with doomed religious politics) is a cheat, and LVT being, well, a man, perhaps complicates or undermines the point, but I think he did a really amazing job, both facts considered. This is a highly feminist film, and not in a ‘beat you over the head’ trying too hard kind of way.

That said, there are no happy endings here. The evil men do in their mind is not equal to the evil they can do with their bodies. The final act is spectacularly rough and hard to watch at times (spoiler alert: Udo Kier’s character is simply billed as “Sadistic Sailor”). But it’s never a morality lesson. If anything, it’s a lesson against the entire concept of morality. And it’s a notion he would completely break wide open with his next project, The Idiots.

ranking lars von trier cont'd
#3 ↩ • ↪ #1

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,157 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,159 ⫸

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Breaking the Waves is a 1996 psychological drama film directed and co-written by Lars von Trier and starring Emily Watson in her feature film acting debut, and with Stellan Skarsgård, a frequent collaborator with von Trier. It was released on May 18, 1996.