After starting his career with a series of highly stylized
films, Lars von Trier made Breaking the
Waves, his first after co-founding the Dogma 95 movement, which preached
absolute austerity: only location and handheld shooting, only contemporary
settings, no non-diegetic sound or optical manipulation, no superficial action,
no credit for the director, etc. Typically, he had trouble even playing by his
own rules, and von Trier’s break-through film arrived without Dogma
95-certification, largely because of the hyper-stylized, digitally-colored
chapter titles accompanied by non-diegetic pop songs by the likes of Jethro
Tull, David Bowie, and Elton John to establish the seventies time period.
Breaking the Waves
may have failed to live up to the strictures of Dogma 95, but it was most
successful in kicking off two decades of controversy courting with his riskiest
storyline yet. Bess, a religiously sheltered woman, fulfills her paralyzed
husband’s wish for her to seek sex outside their marriage, but she does so in
increasingly dangerous and degrading ways. What a lot of critics miss about Breaking the Waves—and similarly
provocative films such as Dogville
and Antichrist—is that the patriarchy
is always von Trier’s real villain. He often conveys this complexly by showing
how oppressive institutions twist the thinking of the women they wish to oppress.
In Breaking the Waves that
institution is a misogynistic religious order and the surrounding community.
Its victim is Bess, who believes the only way to do her “duty” to her husband is
by suffering, and that suffering is neither glamorized nor fetishized. The hero
of Breaking the Waves is Emily Watson
in a career-making role that demanded a hell of a lot from her and found her giving
so much more than that. She makes the seemingly simple Bess into a lovable,
loving, intensely passionate, and ultimately rebellious woman, shredding a
recent claim that von Trier is obsessed with “emotionally empty women” in a
denunciation of his new film Nymphomaniac
on Jezebel.com. I have yet to see that film, but having seen all of his others,
I can say that it applies to no von Trier character I’ve ever seen. I’m more on
board with actor Stellan Skarsgård, who
says von Trier creates some of the best roles for women in an interview on
Criterion’s new blu-ray/DVD combo edition of Breaking the Waves.
As much as I
love Breaking the Waves, I was a bit skeptical about its appearance in
hi-definition. Aside from those gorgeous chapter-title sequences and the brief, fantastical, transcendent digital-image that ends the film, it is a grainy movie
shot with shaky hand-held camera. Criterion’s 4k digital restoration does not
transform Breaking the Waves into 2001:
A Space Odyssey or anything (that would violate the aesthetic von Trier intended),
but it does sharpen the film considerably, rendering Artisan’s blurry DVD from
2000 unwatchable.
The film looks darker with more natural tones than the washed-out blues that
made the actors look like the walking dead on the Artisan DVD. The restoration
made me feel like I’d never really seen Breaking
the Waves before. So did the reintroduction of shots censored from the Artisan
disc, as well as one change that actually altered the film for the worse in my
opinion. In its theatrical run, David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” played over the
final chapter title. Because of rights issues, it was replaced with Elton
John’s “Your Song” on the Artisan DVD. Criterion restores the Bowie song to the
film. I won’t deny that “Life on Mars?” is a much better song than “Your Song”,
but I always found that the naked, corny emotion of John’s song complimented
the melodramatic ending of Breaking the
Waves with an almost unbearable emotional intensity, so I do miss it.
I have no complaints about the other aspects of Criterion’s
new edition. It is stuffed with about 1 hour and 45 minutes of bonus material,
including an ingenious selective audio commentary that boils the comments down
to the most interesting ones over a 47-minute summary edit of the main feature.
So we are spared having to listen to a lot of “umming” and “ahhing” over scenes
about which the commentators have nothing much to say. There is also a riveting
new interview with Emily Watson in which she discusses her very personal and
quite astonishing connection to the character she played. A selection of deleted and extended scenes,
one of which makes Bess’s husband’s righteous intentions too explicit, reveals
how Breaking the Waves could have been a lesser film with their
inclusion. A smattering of other goodies, some of which are a lot more
light-hearted than the heavy feature, make this a surprising and satisfying
release.
