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March 14, 2005
Breaking the Waves
Breaking the Waves (1996), Lars von Trier:
I received a tip about our school's undergraduate library and their bountiful video collection and sure enough, there it was. Thank you, University trustees for deciding we students need Terminator 3 to facilitate our education. This solves my problem with Netflix in that out-of-print discs soon disappear from circulation because of extraordinary wear and tear.
Anyway, who knew that Lars could be so tender? In the two sacrificial lamb ones I've seen, Dogville and Dancer in the Dark, he showed love towards his heroines, but seemingly only to break our hearts so thoroughly later. Maybe he hadn't cultivated that mean streak early. I don't know.
Emily Watson is by far the most sympathetic character of his I've seen (she's by far the best actor I've seen in von Trier's works, too, and he's had a bunch of good ones). He never completely forsakes her, follows the same basic arc as La Strada. For all the world's abuse, we know her spirit will emerge unscathed. By the same token, the rest of the world isn't really mean, just uncapable of understanding. It's hard to hate any of the potential bad guys. Everyone's just playing his part, and there's a happy ending afer everything is finished.
My first analogy was going to be to the passion play, but I'm not it's a good one. Breaking the Waves is, despite whatever forced metaphors, highly spiritual. It reminded me a lot of Fanny and Alexander with its pervasive and everyday presence of God, even if they don't outwardly invoke Him. I guess where Dogville was the Old Testament God of smiting and retribution, Breaking the Waves was the New Testament humanity and salvation. I'm not sure how forced that is, either.
15/15
Posted by bing at March 14, 2005 03:25 PM