Review of Breaking the Waves (1996) by Lauren D — 18 Oct 2010

What a downer this one was. First off it really needs to be said that Emily Watson delivers an absolutely brilliant performance. It was literally painful watching her throughout this film. The rest of the cast kept up for sure, but Watson was above and beyond everyone else on screen easily. The photography in this movie was also absolutely beautiful, and I felt the film benefited overall from the Dogma style camera work.

Now onto the controversy that seems to surround everything Lars Von Trear does. As far as accusations of misogyny go, I really don't agree in any of his films I have seen so far. I am starting to notice a common pattern, however, in that in most of his films the female lead is almost always naive, to the point of being incredibly clueless and borderline stupid. Still though his leading female characters always have hearts of gold and are ultimately the victims of cruel, arrogant, opertunistic men. Accusations of misanthropy would make much more sense to me as almost none of the characters in Von Trears films are ever both kind hearted and smart or powerful. Thats not to say there arent likeable characters in his films, just none of them are ever the usual perfect specimens that most hollywood films rely on for their protagonists.

I saw this movie more as an attack against organized religion and the herd mentality it instills on its followers. I'm not going to give the ending away but Jesus would have understood that Bess was following the righteous path of love, despite putting herself through Hell to do such. Yes, this movie is difficult to watch at times and its not going to be for everybody, but if you want to watch an emotionally powerful film, that is also extremely challenging and complex, then I would strongly recommend this.