Breaking the Waves

Saw Breaking the Waves, a reasonably grueling story about an Irish girl named Bess who loves her husband, Jan, with an all-consuming, self-destroying love.  This love is set in opposition with the faith of her community when Jan becomes paralyzed and, in an effort to get Bess to move on from him, urges and then orders her to take a lover.  How can she obey him as her heart desires, if it flies in the face of her personal faith and of the social mores of her community?

The film is in the spirit of Tess of the D'Urbervilles or the Book of Job: a grinding, miserable tragedy in which we watch in awe as the protagonist weathers storm after storm and is slowly failed by all of her support systems.  It is not a fun film, but it is fascinating to watch this poor girl suffer and yet retain her innocence.  Surprisingly, the husband Jan does not come off badly - his actions seem reasonable to me and I could see myself doing similar things.  Her love, I feel, is just too strong - she loves Jan too much: he wants to sacrifice his claim on her body to save her sanity but she is all too glad to dispose of anything as long as she can remain true to him.  There's a scene where he's leaving to work on an oil derrick and she runs off crying, later found banging a loading crane with a piece of rebar, screaming her despair to the sky.  I mean, that's a big reaction, Bess.

There's many revealing and clever scenes in the film.  The first I wanted to bring up is at her wedding, where her grandfather (one of the church elders) watches disapprovingly as Jan's friends drink cans of beer.  One of the friends crushes his empty beer can, so her grandfather crushes a drinking glass in his fist.  He opens his fist to show the bloody scratches and to show that he is willing to follow his narrow rigidity even to self-destruction.

There's another scene where Bess watches a child's film off-screen.  She's watching in open-mouthed delight and Jan is watching her unbelievingly, like he can't believe anyone could be so pure and wholesome as to be transfixed by this movie.  But this is what is winning about Bess: she comes off as possibly crazy, bizarrely and sometimes grotesquely innocent, but in this innocence she finds joy and delight and this joy wavers, but endures even to the final scenes of the film.  It's heartbreaking but in a kind of uplifting way.  Also, I always enjoy a film about obsessions and madness.

This is an early film by Lars Von Trier, so he hadn't quite embraced his trademark sadism fully, and consequently the film ends as happily as it could.  The last scenes feel a bit jarring and a bit unearned, but I'll take any happiness Von Trier lets slip - statements like that are probably what lead to Dancer In The Dark!