Breaking the Waves

Danish director Lars von Trier's stunning English-language debut reminds me of Tom Wolfe's statement that few artists find their calling because they have Big Ideas to express. More often, they simply have a flair for the heat and sizzle of style and add the steak (i.e., substance) later. If they're lucky. With this artlessly profound and affecting story of love, von Trier emerges as one of those blessed filmmakers -- the Coen Brothers and Wong Kar-Wai also pop to mind -- who've managed to blend their early stylistic flamboyance with enough human empathy to make their work both visually and emotionally compelling. Unlike his previous claim to fame, the hyper-stylish but infuriatingly pretentious Zentropa, Breaking the Waves tells a story as accessible to the mind as water is to the body. It all happens during the early Seventies in a remote Scottish village dominated by hellfire-and-damnation Calvinism and a flinty-eyed distrust of all “outsiders.” When a local girl named Bess (British newcomer Watson) marries one of those outsiders, an offshore oil-rig worker named Jan (Skarsgard), the match is only tolerated because of the girl's unimpeachable virtue and gung-ho commitment to the church. The newlyweds' idyll ends abruptly when Jan is hurt in a work accident and paralyzed, apparently for life. Despairing of his life-loving bride's dismal future as caregiver to an invalid, he rocks her world with a bizarre proposal. Bess will take lovers and later regale him with all the juicy details. In this way she'll be spared functional widowhood, and erotic intimacy of a sort will be possible for the couple. Though initially horrified by Jan's idea, Bess soon discovers a surprising knack for these randy exploits. She even reconciles them with her religion in fervent prayer sessions during which she voices both her pleas to the deity and his responses. As implausible and prurient as this sounds, it's really neither. Von Trier's script couches the entire narrative in terms of good intentions by people with deep, if strangely expressed love for one another. The tragic denouement results not from malice, but the unintended fallout from that love. Watson is the engine that pulls the entire film with her risky, emotionally naked acting. Close-ups of her preternaturally expressive face consume long spans of screen time, and the pain, confusion and electric vitality of her spirit connect directly with the viewer's heart. Added punch comes from the stellar camerawork of Robby Müller (Mystery Train, To Live and Die in LA), whose images establish the primal bond between the rocky Scottish coastline and the equally hard people who inhabit it. Von Trier, in keeping with the tone of his story, holds his MTVesque visual tendencies in check, with only the Flemish Masters on Acid look of his episode-opening landscapes truly recalling his past work. This is a tale that, one suspects, comes from the fortyish von Trier's own storehouse of memory. Everything suggests it, from the period soundtrack music (by the likes of Procol Harum, Roxy Music, and T Rex) to the startling verisimilitude of the characters. In interviews, he couches this film as an experiment, his stab at an old-fashioned melodrama. For once, the famously arrogant von Trier is too modest. Melodrama evolved as a bastardized offspring of tragedy, and that older, nobler form is the one to which Breaking the Waves belongs. Here's hoping von Trier's “experiment” with human-centered storytelling is one he'll extend throughout his career. (Opens 12/27)