Breaking The Waves (DVD)

A twisted, sadistic, manipulative, nasty little piece of nothing very much from the twisted, sadistic, manipulative and nasty Lars Von Trier, Breaking The Waves is, like his later Dancer In The Dark and Dogville, a cynical, misogynist melodrama that comes a hell of a lot closer to "Torture Porn" than anything Eli Roth has ever crafted. Emily Watson plays the childlike, mentally unstable Bess McNeil - the Holy Fool of the piece, pretty much - who, as a means of pleasing her recently paralysed husband Jan (Stellan Skarsgård), sets about prostituting herself to an array of increasingly unpleasant men, that the vicarious thrill afforded the stricken ...  Read the complete review

Lars Von Trier’s ‘Breaking the Waves’ is a powerful and emotive story of obsessive love. Set in the Scottish Islands we follow the love life of one of their local girls marrying out of the village to a worldly stranger, Jan, that bewitches the young girl. When an accident renders Jan paralysed he insists that his new wife takes lovers outside of wedlock to keep their own relationship rich with love, life and sex. ‘Breaking the Waves’ is filmed with realistic camera techniques that many viewers will find reminiscent of documentary film-making. Von Trier litters the film with his brand of realism with sporadic jump-cuts that can, ...  Read the complete review

Breaking The Waves is the story of Bess, a naïve and childlike young woman living in a close-knit religious community in a remote area of Scotland. Bess falls in love with Jan, a free-spirited Norwegian oilrig worker and the pair marry. Their relationship is so passionate and intense that Bess is inconsolable when Jan has to go back to the oil rig. She turns to God to bring her husband back to her and He does, although not in the way Bess expects and from here their relationship changes and Bess' love for her husband and faith in God are tested. I'll leave the explanation there as I don't want to give too much of the plot away. This film is absolutely ...  Read the complete review

In my opinion one of the very best films that Lars Von Triers has made, "Breaking The Waves" couldn't be more different to "Antichrist" or at least, the sound of "Antichrist", as I'm too squeamish to watch it! Breaking The Waves starts off with Emily Watson's character "Bess" screaming and virtually hitting her boyfriend for being late, as he lands from his aircraft at her village. The first impression we get of her is one of a deranged psychopath! However, we soon find out that that's not the case and she is in fact a sweet, kind-hearted lady, if perhaps a little naive. It's a beautiful yet heartbreaking ...  Read the complete review

It was, I think, during a screening of this movie at Cannes that the film critic Mark Kermode stood up and shouted 'Il est merde!'. Even if that was during one of Von Trier's other movies (and it could have been any one of them), most people will probably react in this way when watching 'Breaking the Waves'. It's the story of a girl in a Scottish village who talks to God and marries an oil worker; he's later crippled and persuades her to prostitute herself so that she can then describe her sexual experiences to him. Everyone despises her, she has a breakdown, and then... Well, if you really want to know how this rancid, ...  Read the complete review