Breaking the Waves
by Lars von Trier
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Adrian Rawlins, Emily Watson, Jean-Marc Barr, Katrin Cartlidge, Stellan Skarsg?rdDirector: Lars von Trier
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Color, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC
Picture Format: Letterbox, 1.85:1
Running Time: 152 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2000-07-25
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Artisan Entertainment
Movie Reviews of Breaking the Waves
Movie Review: Silly, Pointless
Summary: 2 Stars
I usually stick to just reviewing what I like, but the distance between how some people speak of this film, and the reality of the movie itself, is so great that I feel compelled to chime in.
It's incoherent and pointless. It's just a sick Sirk-like (as in Douglas Sirk) melodrama that changes tone somewhere in the middle, as the director apparently likes to do. It's adds up to nothing and it seems rather obvious that this writer/director wouldn't have it any other way - he makes smirking little facsimilies of art products, not actual art products. This is like a bad parody of Fassbinder's take on Sirk's movies.
The lead actors are great, and Von Trier is technically just fine as a screenwriter and as a director. But don't be fooled into thinking that he's furthering cinema in some way with movies like this. He's just yanking chains and the only personal expression going on here is him laughing at the audience.
Summary of Breaking the Waves
When Bess, a naive young woman, marries Jan, a handsome oil-rig worker, she experiences passion and physical pleasure that she never imagined. Their bliss is cut short when an accident on the rig leaves Jan paralyzed. Believing he will never make love to Bess again, he tells her to take other lovers, convincing her that this will help his recovery. Bess is sent spiraling into a world of dark emotions she cannot understandSet in an unmercifully rugged, coastal village in Scotland in the 1970s, this extraordinary film by Lars von Trier stars British actress Emily Watson as a barely contained naive named Bess, who holds regular conversations with God and whose pure and intensely personal faith is hardly tolerated by the gruesome Calvinist elders of her church. Bess marries an oil-rig worker (Stellan Skarsgard) and comes to believe that erotic discovery is a part of God's grand plan. But after her spouse is hurt in an accident, she decides that divine instruction is leading her toward the life of a prostitute--with disastrous but somehow beautiful results. Von Trier (The Kingdom) has made a wonderful, entirely unexpected, and rigorous work of discovery in this film, with a formal visual design that recalls classic films by Carl Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson. Watson is a phenomenon, her wide-eyed wonder at the world as God's handiwork a breathtaking portrayal of conviction. --Tom Keogh
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