Breaking the Waves is a film Danish of Lars von Trier left in 1996.

Synopsis

Bess Marie with Jan which works on an oil platform in the north of the Scotland. Their relation is passion. She requests so that it returns healthy and except but she finds it the nape of the neck broken in an industrial accident and incompetent to move and of course to have from now on sexual relationships. He then asks him to go with other men and to tell him the details. Bess reaches this request, knows relations more and more deviating and dangerous while making feel guilty. She convinces herself nevertheless to act according to the desires of God.

In the middle of the incomprehension of the family, weight of the Rigorous religion of a village, it tries to continue to make live this love, by procuration, in limit of perversity then by a kind of total sacrifice.

In a transfer of vital energy quasi-magic, he cures as it sinks physically, while keeping preserved his incoercible love and inébranlable.

Comments

In this film which approaches the stylistic step of the “Dogme95” without to be in conformity there, Lars von Trier signs a dramatic history of love. The service of Emily Watson is époustouflante from comes up with which it is able to put in scene and of the feelings of a perfect unreal purity and yet which appear possible and true, and the attacks of nerves accompanying this love, to safeguard it. How the infinite kindness and the simplicity of a person can plunge it in full heart of a hell of which it is not even aware, and who has its eyes is only one test to legitimate and continue an already total and absolute love.

Data sheet

• Title: Breaking the Waves
• Realization: Lars von Trier
• Scenario: Lars von Trier and Peter Asmussen
• Production: Peter Aalbæk Jensen, Vibeke Windeløv, Axel Helgeland, Rob Langestraat, Marianne Slot and Peter van Vogelpoel
• Music: Joachim Holbek
• Photography: Robby Müller
• Assembly: Anders Refn
• Country of origin: Denmark, Sweden, France, Netherlands, Norway, Iceland
• Format: Colors - 2,35:1 - Dolby DIGITAL - 35 mm
• Kind: Drama, lovesong
• Lasted: 159 minutes
• Comings out date: May 1996 (Cannes festival), July 5th 1996 (Denmark), October 9th 1996 (France), October 16th 1996 (Belgium), November 29th 1996 (Canada)
• Film prohibited with less than 12 years at the time of its exit in France

Distribution

• Emily Watson: Bess McNeill
• Stellan Skarsgård : Jan Nyman
• Katrin Cartlidge : Dodo McNeill
• Jean-Marc Barr: Terry
• Adrian Rawlins : Dr. Richardson
• Jonathan Hackett: Pasteur
• Sandra Voe: The mother
• Udo Kier: The sadistic sailor
• Mikkel Gaup: Pits
• Roef Ragas: Pim
• Phil McCall : The grandfather
• Robert Robertson: The president
• Desmond Reilly: Year Elder
• Sarah Gudgeon: Sybilla
• Finlay Welsh : The coroner

Rewards

• Grand Prix of the jury to the Cannes festival 1996
• César of the best foreign film

See too

• Breaking the Waves on Internet Movie Database

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