Breaking The Waves - Film Only (Breaking The Waves (DVD))

Member Name: DavidJay

Product:	Breaking The Waves (DVD)
Date:	02/12/08 (32 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Far better performances than the film deserves.

Disadvantages: Let's see - sadistic, inhumane, dishonest, cowardly...

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 might serve to miraculously cure him.

The inhabitants of the remote Scottish island on which the pair reside soon turn on her - first the church, then her mother, then the entire community - heaping indignity and torment upon indignity and torment until the eventual, predictable Von Trier finale.

It is a wretched picture which, like any number of similar works, lacks the courage to admit its intent, and so cloaks most everything in veils of kitsch, irony and embarrassing, juvenile Brecht-For-Beginners distancing tactics.

The two films it most obviously aspires to - Dreyer's masterpiece The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (Bess is clearly a Joan in all but name) and Godard's Vivre Sa Vie (from the "chapter" breaks to the particulars of the narrative arc to the continual glances to the camera - the latter invoking also Bergman's Summer With Monika and Felini's Nights Of Cabiria amongst innumerable others) - are arguably just as keen on revelling in suffering, but to ends far removed from Von Trier's. Breaking The Waves engages neither the soul nor the mind - it is an (admittedly well directed, for what its worth) insulting, offensive exercise in manipulation - a Sirkian melodrama shorn of heart or insight, loaded with bile and hatred in their stead.

The performances, as is always the case in Von Trier's work, are wonderful throughout - far, far better than the film deserves. The handheld camerawork which would become a key Von Trier staple is wholly effective, lending a documentary immediacy to events.

So there is no doubting, then, that it does what it sets out to do exceptionally well - that what it sets out to do is so utterly abhorrent is where the problem lies.

Summary: A wretched, sadistic excercise in audience manipulation.