Our prevailing moviemaking ethos calls for emotion to be tempered through a kind of ebb and flow structure, for an emotion to be slowly built toward and quickly moved away from. One of Breaking the Waves’ more insurgent gambits is its near‑eradication of ebb. Whenever a performance lost intensity or emotion (flow), the editors would hard cut to an alternate take where the heightened feeling remained intact, or if there wasn’t one, they would cut to the next scene. It’s in this choice that the title develops its poignancy. A “breaking wave” refers to a series of ever-repeating climaxes in nature, and nearly every scene in Breaking the Waves has some emotional peak that in most films would be reserved for the third-act climax. As is demonstrated early on through a series of fits, tantrums, moments of extreme elation, Bess lives her life in a constant state of flow; she is a “breaking wave.”
* * *
Roughly two minutes into Lars von Trier’s 1996 film Breaking the Waves, Emily Watson, as Bess McNeill, turns and looks at the camera, at the audience, and forms a small upward displacement at the corners of her mouth, describable as either a friendly, inward-turned smile or a snicker. Those who’ve seen the film know the distinct eeriness of being unsure whether it’s the former or latter, whether we are being invited or challenged to watch the rest of the film. Certainly, the de Sade-like tribulations suffered by its protagonist make Breaking the Waves a merciless evening’s viewing. And it’s not unfair to leave a screening of the film feeling that the last 152 minutes of your life were spent at the receiving end of a cattle prod — held by a director interested only in your levels of seat squirming. Anyone half-educated with von Trier’s controversial oeuvre, or his equally incendiary public appearances, might be tempted to adopt this skeptical view of him and his work. Even those unfamiliar with the director need only to look at the tattoo splayed across his right hand — which, if read right to left, spells out “KCUF” — to understand why he has garnered the reputation of enfant terrible and the nickname of “Danish Cinema’s Bad Boy.” The point of this article is to exorcise some of the provocateur mythos that too often pairs with discussions of von Trier. For, though Breaking the Waves is the type of film whose recommendation without forewarning borders on cruel, it is not simply an exercise in sensationalism. Watch the film with openness, curiosity, maybe a little faith, and you will find yourself crediting von Trier when he says, as he did in an 1994 interview with Lars K. Anderson, “There’s not a damn grain of devilry in me. It’s only an image they’ve constructed.”
Any description of Breaking the Waves inevitably spotlights the film’s more transgressive, thriller-like character. And many who flocked to the film on its release, excited by its nifty little trailer and a promise of the unholy, went for precisely this brand of tantalization. To be sure, the story of a husband in critical condition who goads his obsessively in-love wife to sleep with other men to satisfy his own bedridden libido — only for her to find that his condition improves on compliance and falters with refusal — is a recipe for an edgy, edge-of-your-seat night at the movies. Yet with that synopsis in mind, it becomes just as difficult to explain to the unfamiliar viewer that Breaking the Waves is a love story and not a thriller, as it is to sell a love story to an audience seeking a thriller, or indeed a Lars von Trier film.
By the year of Breaking the Waves’ release in Cannes, von Trier’s reputation had long since calcified as that of someone never more than two breaths from a prod, punchline, or provocation. His first three films, ’84’s The Element of Crime, ’89’s Epidemic, and ’91’s Europa (his Europe Trilogy), were all works of hyper-ironic meta-fiction. Orchestral climaxes punctuating ecstatic I-love-you’s were employed with winks and elbow nudges. True sincerity was sparse, humanism scarce. Actors were little more than pawns for the camera to dance around in admittedly beautiful, precise, cinematic trick shots à la Tarkovsky by way of Hitchcock. In a 2000 interview with Gavin Smith, von Trier stated that in this period his direction of actors amounted to little more than telling them “to stand in a corner, count to four, take one step to the left,” etc. At the time, many critics conceded there was talent but insisted it was trapped under layers of show-pony formalism that drowned anything like emotional force in exhibitions of the camera and script’s own cleverness. Still, there were those who saw The Europe Trilogy as precisely their kind of cinema. The trilogy’s dismissal of sentimentality was certainly in keeping with the growing cachet of postmodernism, and its own drive to make art more the product of technicians and mathematicians than what might be called artists.
Europa
It was to those fans of von Trier’s earlier work that Breaking the Waves was the most stupefying, as nearly every aspect of the director’s style had mysteriously 180’d. The precise, Tarkovskyan maneuvers of his Europe Trilogy were replaced with a rough, ever-shaking documentary camera, choppy editing pyrotechnics that avidly middle-fingered the editor’s rulebook, a purposefully drab color palette of brown and ochre hues that made the film look as if it were shot through a mud puddle, and an improv-favoring style of directing that resulted in some of the most uncomfortably credible performances of the decade. Von Trier’s storytelling had also evolved into something more immersed in humanism. The Europe Trilogy favored events and environments, using characters as nothing but an insipid point of view through which these milieus were explored. Breaking the Waves broke from that in two ways. First, by being character-driven, allowing the conflict to arise as a product of character, not environment. Second, by treating that conflict with a soap opera-seriousness that seemed to lack even a gram of irony. Take, for example, the saccharine line “Love is a mighty power!,” which is written and spoken with such sincerity that it elicits a borderline hyperglycemic response in the audience.
Breaking the Waves sits at the head of what became The Golden Heart Trilogy, followed by The Idiots (1998), a kind of perverse screwball comedy about friends who play at mental disability, and Dancer in the Dark (2000), a musical depicting a woman’s descent into blindness. The trilogy gets its title from an infamously sappy children’s story of the same name. A girl, Goldenheart, traveling through the woods, gives away each of her personal belongings to help a flock of forest animals. At the end of her journey she is left in the forest-cold without even the clothes on her back, warmed only by a notion of having done good in the world. Each film in The Golden Heart Trilogy follows a similar narrative pattern: an innocent, almost saintly protagonist, an outlier of her society, sacrifices herself for the greater good of another. Von Trier had first read the story as a boy and was moved to tears by the girl’s sacrifice, much to his own embarrassment. His Marxist parents had deemed Goldenheart a piece of overly sentimental, bourgeois drivel, and it was thus the target of perennial mockery throughout his youth. For context, Marxist-Leninist aesthetics had semi-banned the notion of sentimentality from the literate diet of any worthwhile proletarian. The big, syrupy emotions of the melodrama and soap opera were alleged lies of (and for) the bourgeoisie; intellectual realism was for, and accurately reflected, the proletarian.
Breaking the Waves, with all the sticky-sweet bathos inherited from Goldenheart, exists as a plainspoken rejection of this philosophy; therefore it’s no surprise that von Trier’s family was unkind to the film, his brother having gone so far as to call him and remark that he found it even more repugnant on a second viewing. It would be a lie to say this sentiment wasn’t shared by some of the public. Even many who lauded the film had to admit: it was a bit corny.
* * *
It’s safe to say that by 1996, irony had well and truly wrapped its bony little fingers around the throat of mass culture. TV shows from the 1990s like Seinfeld and Beavis and Butthead can be said to epitomize the medium’s turn from Days of Our Lives-type sincerity to dry “well-how-do-you-like-that” sardonicism. And while Seinfeld or Beavis and Butthead are no longer what one would consider hip, scan around our current mediascape, at the wry house style of modern Hollywood, and you’ll undoubtedly notice that irony’s grip has only tightened, leaving us all blue in the face.
What is so nauseating about sincerity? You’re hardly alone if you find that movie scenes of people articulating their love, their hurt, any other emotional upheaval, trigger some aesthetic gag reflex where the only response is to jeer at how inflated, stagey, or vaguely cringe the whole thing feels. There’s perhaps a familiar awkwardness in watching an action film with a friend or parent, and in both of you stifling tears at the wounded hero’s breathless “tell my wife I love her,” or in both of you erupting with cheers in the next scene when he lurches in from the shadows, miraculously all patched up and gun-toting, to quip: “Never mind, I’ll tell her myself.” The embarrassment seems to come from actually buying into the drama. These are, of course, only actors. This never really happened. To cry or cheer or feel anything implies, in the harsh words of the cynic, that you were stupid enough to have been manipulated by the film. It was a lapse in your better judgment: you lost control, and were thus left vulnerable.
“I needed to lose control,” Trier had self-diagnosed in a 1998 interview with Ebbe Iversen, speaking about the years following completion of his byzantine Europe Trilogy and his subsequent co-creator of the Dogme 95 movement with fellow filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg. A kind of back-to-basics regimen, Dogme was a cold-turkey renunciation of the overproduced, effects-swaddled paradigm that had begun consuming filmmaking worldwide. Directors interested in making a Dogme film would have to take a “Vow of Chastity,” promising an abstinence from (for example) computer graphics, studio sets, artificial blood, even the use of industry-standard film cameras — Dogme films were shot with the same camcorders ’90s parents would use for their toddlers’ birthdays.
On the set
While not made in adherence to the Vow of Chastity and so not a certified Dogme film, Breaking the Waves did adopt numerous strictures of the movement’s philosophy. It’s likely no coincidence that a film inspired by the story of a girl left utterly bare by all that she gave away is the product of a director choosing to be left bare by the stripping down of his process. From the aforementioned Iversen interview, von Trier even likened Dogme to “being a nudist and not having to worry about what you aren’t wearing.”
Key among Dogme’s influences on Breaking the Waves is the manifesto’s third commandment: “Camera must be handheld.” During shooting, von Trier simply mounted the camera on his shoulder and, more or less abandoning the idea of pre-planned shots, asked the actors to run the scene while he reacted in real time to their various improvisations. Throughout most of the film, the camera remains in claustrophobic close-up, as if seeking to go deeper than skin. It’s almost embarrassing to spend a feature-length stretch three inches away from somebody’s face, to see the snot dripping from their nose as they cry or every muscle of their face redden and contort when they scream.
Our prevailing moviemaking ethos calls for emotion to be tempered through a kind of ebb and flow structure, for an emotion to be slowly built toward and quickly moved away from. One of Breaking the Waves’ more insurgent gambits is its near‑eradication of ebb. Whenever a performance lost intensity or emotion (flow), the editors would hard cut to an alternate take where the heightened feeling remained intact, or if there wasn’t one, they would cut to the next scene. It’s in this choice that the title develops its poignancy. A “breaking wave” refers to a series of ever-repeating climaxes in nature, and nearly every scene in Breaking the Waves has some emotional peak that in most films would be reserved for the third-act climax. As is demonstrated early on through a series of fits, tantrums, moments of extreme elation, Bess lives her life in a constant state of flow; she is a “breaking wave.”
Watching a film shot with this philosophy makes it unflatteringly clear just how much we rely on cold distance to make it through an emotional film. Without technique, there is nothing but the actors and their emotions, the director’s camera and its interests, and the audience. For many, being presented with emotion, bereft of ornamentation or distraction, is simply too uncomfortable to be anything but a strictly uncomfortable experience.
Show Breaking the Waves to a friend and they will go into one of three camps: (1) They will think it was sincere and beautiful. (2) They will think it was sincere and cheesy. (3) They will think it was cheesy but a satire. In ’96, fans of the Europe Trilogy generally reconciled von Trier’s shift from intellectual irony to cornball soap opera by placing themselves in the third camp. Everything the director had done up till then was satire, after all. And everything in Breaking the Waves, all of its corny lines, the uplifting message that “love conquers all,” seemed too sincere to be the result of true sincerity. And if that were the case, then what possibly could have inspired the Bad Boy of Danish Cinema’s sudden about-face?
In 1989, von Trier, visiting his mother, Inger Trier, on her deathbed received a confession. His late father, Ulf Trier, was in fact not his biological father. Lars’ biological father was Fritz Michael Hartmann, a colleague with whom Inger had an affair because she wanted a child with artistic genes. When Inger died, Lars reached out to Hartmann hoping to form some late-in-life connection but was rejected. Hartmann wanted nothing to do with his filmmaker son.
Is this whole event not something straight out of a soap opera? One can imagine how living through such a melodramatic scenario might prove something to any staunch anti-sentimentalist. Real life is sappy, even cliché.
It was around this time that the script for Breaking the Waves had begun to form in von Trier’s mind. How much his complex personal dramas impacted the film’s overall creation is the territory of hearsay, yet it’s all too tempting to speculate. In the commentary track for Dancer in the Dark, a film whose core is just as gooey (if not more so) as Breaking the Waves, von Trier states his belief that “you can be taken further by your feelings than you can by your intellect.” Bess is a character people consider stupid for showing emotions; the tug-of-war between intellect and feeling is more present in her than in any other of his protagonists. Her look toward the camera is him telling us that she is not stupid, that he is on her side, and we should be too. Yet at the same time, it is a kind of challenging snicker. However, she is not daring us to watch the rest of the film, but rather daring us to take it seriously. The suspicion that Breaking the Waves is a joke or satire, because it appears as a joke or satire, ignores the film’s bigger truth. In a 1999 TV interview with Marc Gervais, von Trier gave as clear an explanation as we will likely ever get: “I’ve never done anything in my life that wasn’t serious. It might look like a joke, but so does life.”
Works Cited
Anderson, Lars K. “Interview with Lars von Trier.” Lars von Trier: Interviews, edited by Jan Lumholdt, University Press of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 89,
Smith, Gavin. “Interview with Lars von Trier.” Lars von Trier: Interviews, edited by Jan Lumholdt, University Press of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 150
Iversen, Ebbe. “Interview with Lars von Trier.” Lars von Trier: Interviews, edited by Jan Lumholdt, University Press of Mississippi, 2003, pp. 126, 128
von Trier, Lars. Dancer in the Dark. Director’s commentary. Artisan Entertainment, 2001.
von Trier, Lars. “Lars von Trier Interview – The Directors, 1999.” Interview by Marc Gervais. The Directors, Bravo, 1999.
YouTube, uploaded by “Victim of VHS,” 24 Apr. 2023, https://youtu.be/IbHjU3cbx6E.
* * *
Unless otherwise noted, all mages are screenshots from Breaking the Waves.
