Breaking the Waves

Breaking the Waves (1996) is set in a strict Calvinist community in the north of Scotland in the seventies. Bess marries a man who works on an oil rig. He is paralysed in an accident and asks her to be with other men and then tell him about it. Bess treats this as part of a bargain with God. Lars von Trier's first choice for Bess was Helena Bonham Carter. She withdrew before shooting, reportedly over the amount of nudity and sexuality the role required. Emily Watson was entirely unknown in film at the time and won the part at her audition. Watson was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for what was her first feature. The film is divided into seven chapters, each opening with a landscape sequence. The artist Per Kirkeby made those interludes, scored with early seventies rock, and they sit completely apart from the handheld tension of everything around them. Von Trier shot throughout on handheld Super 35mm. To get the grain he transferred the footage to video and back to film; in his own words he encoded the image and wanted the audience to decode it. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1996. It cost 7.5 million dollars and grossed around 23 million worldwide. It runs 159 minutes. Good for: narratives about faith and sacrifice, Emily Watson, and formal risk. Less good for: what the film does to its heroine is systematic and many viewers cannot sit through it. There is sexual violence. The final scene delivers a supernatural endorsement that makes everything the film built contestable.