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Nelson reviews "Breaking the Waves" directed by Lars von Trier.

Since its U.S. release in late 1996, Lars von Trier's latest movie has garnered a rather heated grassroots critical response that runs, "It's great until the last third, which is over the top, and the ending, which is way over the top and ruins it." The twists of plot and style that this highly narcissistic director terms his "whims," however, are part of a deliberate, if unfamiliar, aesthetic enterprise that may not be immediately visible to the uninitiated.

First we trip over the title, which echoes, but also departs from, two common phrases: "making waves" (something the heroine, Bess, certainly does in her insular environment) and "breaking waves," an act of nature that is also a kind of endlessly repeating climax. "Breaking the waves" inverts both phrases in a characteristically going-against-the-grain manner that embodies the film's aesthetic. The shaky motion of a handheld camera, indispensable feature of 1970s cinema verite (also the decade in which the picture, rather arbitrarily, is set) tricks us next into imagining we are entering a world of gritty naturalism. Not so-this film intends to stake out very different ground indeed.

It's another genre-twisting element, however, that truly sets the film's tone. Breaking the Waves is divided into simply titled "chapters" ("Bess's Marriage," "Jan's Illness") that open with beautiful stills of the stark Scottish landscape patterned after the woodcut vignettes of oldfashioned novels. Half real physical world, half fantasy, these color-tinted photographs beckon us toward a lurid wonderland reminiscent of Maxfield Parrish that contrasts severely with the muted, brownish look of the narrative itself. Over these doctored images of wilderness, in place of what we might reasonably expect by way of background music (i.e., haunting Celtic folk songs tastefully signaling the heroine's sad fate), we get raucous, pumping chestnuts of "outsider" pop hits ("Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" et al.) that act as a Greek chorus to the story (lyrics are carefully matched with the content of each chapter episode) and also defiantly signal the triumph of the main character's taste over Masterpiece Theatre-type aesthetic considerations of local color. (Asked by the dour presbyters of her church what contributions she thinks the outsiders have brought to their village, Bess cheerfully replies, "Their music.")

These emblematic frames tell us exactly how to read the film. Its foundation is the real, harrowing world of human emotions. Onto this bedrock of joy and suffering von Trier wants to graft an expressionist realm that is realer than what, in art, passes conventionally for "real," because it attempts to concretize inner psychological and spiritual forces. In the case of Breaking the Waves, what's being materialized, or transferred from the subjective consciousness of the main character into the landscape, are those forces for good or evil that thickly cluster around the territory of Eros.

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The story of Breaking the Waves goes like this: In a tiny ingrown island community off the coast of Scotland, a highstrung young woman marries a sensual, easygoing oil rigger. Exuberant after her wedding, Bess tells Jan of her austere, bell-less chapel, "Let's make the bells ring!" But she is fated to stumble over her own intensity from the very start. Even Jan's first departure back to work devastates her, and in two-way conversations with God (in which she ventriloquistically assumes both parts) Bess prays desperately-a trifle too desperately?-for his return. An accident on the rig makes this longed-for event happen sooner than expected: her husband returns for good, permanently paralyzed from the neck down. In the aftermath of this catastrophe, Jan tells his new young wife whom he has initiated into the pleasures of sex that she should divorce him, take a lover, because he is no good for her any more. Her characteristically extreme negative response prompts him to cleverly modify his directive: it would please him, he says, if she took lovers and then told him all about it.

To the horror of the others who love her, Bess overcomes her modesty and plunges wholeheartedly into her new role. She is careful, however, not to have sex with any man who genuinely cares for her, such as the young doctor, but initiates only the most brutal, impersonal encounters with the underclass of the port. As ostracism from her church and community loom, the young doctor hits on a last resort: he will have Bess locked up "for her own good" in a mental hospital, as she had been once previously. But Bess escapes police custody and, with the knowledge that Jan is dying, heads out to a freighter in the harbor where she had been savaged before, thinking to sacrifice herself in a tradeoff with God so that Jan will be spared. After the sailors beat her to death, Jan, against all medical reason, revives and even begins walking again. Stealing Bess's body to spare her the ignominious interment of a "sinner damned to hell," he and his friends bury her at sea. Later, back on the rig, his mates joyfully bring Jan topside to hear a miracle in the middle of the North Sea: big grey bells (invisible to sonar, of course) pealing noisily in the sky above them.

The film poses a paradox of warring axioms: Is love the "mighty power" at work here (as Jan maintains), or is it illness (as his sister-in-law has it), or have both forces somehow gotten hopelessly mixed up? In its self-conscious naivete, the literal image von Trier employs to answer this question is a poison pill to late modernist middlebrows (who think of themselves, naturally, as highbrows). Church bells ringing in heaven, how unspeakably corny! Not to mention the "miracle" of Jan's recovery, presumably as a result of Bess's ultimate and fatal sexual adventure. Miracles and bells, the pastel sentimentalism of a turn-of-the-century postcard or Italian roadside shrines, an unholy alliance of 1940s Hollywood movie kitsch with organized religion-quel horror! Caught in the grip of such a kneejerk response, we might not stop to consider that, bizarrely, von Trier's camera gazes down at the enormous bells of heaven from above-a divine perspective that Bess herself occasionally inhabits -rather than from the usual human vantage below; like Bess, we are allowed briefly to assume what English professors used to call the deity's "point of view." This shot alone is a tipoff that the austerities of the twentieth-century avant garde have left coming generations no choice but to rebel by going backward, as it were, into exaggerated conventionalism and cliche, in order to discover an emotionally richer aesthetic vocabulary.

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To most intelligent viewers, the expressionist dimension of Breaking the Waves radically diminishes its psychological credibility. Get rid of that wretched ending, they say, and you would have an affecting study of a borderline personality crushed by circumstance, spousal perversion, and ruthless tribal mores. The same viewers, of course, show nary a quiver of indignation as they watch the plays of Shakespeare featuring all those upsets of nature that describe and embody the moral universe of his characters, because all English majors know that these peculiarities were part of the Elizabethan worldview; Shakespeare is not to be blamed for his ignorance of scientific empiricism. It's okay, then, for Horatio to say to the expiring Hamlet, "Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest," but it's not okay for the bells to ring after Bess's death. Lacking the metaphysical level on which the bells operate, however, Breaking the Waves would be just another example of the sort of art Westerners have happily consumed for a hundred and fifty years: social realism shading into modernism that steadfastly upholds a rational-empirical world view. Lars von Trier's dilemma is somewhat akin to that of Jorge Luis Borges's character Pierre Menard, whose great achievement, you may recall, was to write Don Quixote in the twentieth century-a feat that surpasses Cervantes ' original effort if only because doing so means bucking every wave and ripple (as it were) of the Zeitgeist.

Von Trier is not such an anomaly, however. At the end of the twentieth century an enormous gap in sensibility is yawning, and what it most certainly does not divide is modernism and postmodernism, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of a single aesthetic continuum. Radically different from either of these modes, the new expressionism is a resurrection, if you like, of the Romantic "pathetic fallacy" in such a way that it is neither pathetic nor a fallacy but an implicit assumption that the outer mirrors the inner, that a storm embodies (does not symbolize or "stand for") psychological turmoil, and that bells ringing materialize Bess's inner powers. To those current few but ever-growing adherents of this sensibility, the demand for "realism" is as narrow and two-dimensional as the bells are to Breaking the Waves' detractors. In neoexpressionist terms, the bells represent a Shakespearean ending in which the moral order has been restored by a message from those inner areas of reality we do not experience with our five senses-and it is a defiant message in the face of all sensiblejudgment as rendered by the well-intentioned, both within the film and in the audience.

"The unconscious is outside": This pronouncement by the Slovenian critic Slavoj Zizek neatly sums up the aesthetic of the new expressionism, which first surfaced in a brief flurry of activity in the 1980s among Berlin painters like Salome, Walter Dahn, and Georg Jiri Dokoupil. We find it next, improbably, in 1990s mainstream Hollywood-produced film, where a new generation of young American directors (the Coen brothers, Tim Burton, David Lynch, John Dahl, Quentin Tarentino, and others), using the hackneyed conventions of old movies to create a highly self-conscious aesthetic, transformed 1940s noir into a strange new creature that might be dubbed "Re-Noir." (In American fiction, always a far more conservative art form, an anomalous work like Robert Olen Butler's Tabloid Dreams comes to mind.)

Here are some identifying features of the new expressionism:

- The inner is made visible in the outer. The features of the physical world provide a vocabulary for subjective expression; if you want to know what a character is feeling, look at the landscape instead of her face. When Bess, Learlike, screams out her grief on the cliffs, the crashing waves give us a synchronous picture (John Ruskin notwithstanding) of that grief.

-A metaphysical dimension is present. Externalizing subjective attributes returns us via Romanticism to the Renaissance world of emblem and allegory, and by extension to a cosmic order that is congruent to the subjective world. See, for example, the screenwriter Craig Lucas's amazing Reckless, in which we find ourselves marooned with Mia Farrow inside the bubble of another person's dream. Only at the end of the film do we briefly glimpse the minor character who, like Krishna, has imagined all its wild and unlikely events.

-Cliche serves a higher purpose as allegory. Within a rational worldview, cliche is the only avenue back to allegory because it is the sole arena in which hyperstylization, a precondition of allegory, is possible. The fate of Barton Fink, in the Coen brothers' eponymous film, is instructive here. Barton is a thirties Clifford Odets-type social realist playwright whose dearest wish, when he moves from New York to Los Angeles for a screenwriting job, is to get to know the "common people." But in the world of expressionism, wishes are (as academics like to say) problematic. Soon he is vaulted into the company of a very uncommon common person, the madman played by John Goodman, and the hotel in which they bunk converts to an expressionist nightmare of symmetrical flames, Goodman's own exteriorized hell, when he sets it on fire. Now at the end of his road, Barton is mysteriously transported into the landscape of the kitschy, sentimental magazine picture of a girl on a beach that decorates his room-a social realist's idea of hell if ever there was one. By this time, however, Barton has had quite enough of the "real" world and his future inside this new aesthetic seems positively sunny by comparison.

Judged on its own terms, the terms of the new expressionism, Breaking the Waves is still not a completely realized work of art. What mars its accomplishment is not the dying Jan's miraculous return to life or the ringing bells but rather some big holes in character development that result, one suspects, from shortening the film to a showable length (as it is, Breaking the Waves runs two and a half hours). The director's conception of Jan seems to be not of a pervert, as most parties inside and outside the film assume, but of a decent man who is almost as selfless as Bess. At each turn Jan appears willing to sacrifice his happiness and his life to free his young wife from her loyal bondage to him, as displayed in his insistence that she take a lover and report to him about it (rising, one senses, out of a well-meaning but very male-oriented idea of what it would take to make Bess happy, coupled with the knowledge that she will do anything he says), his signing the papers that will commit Bess and thereby save her from further erotic degradation, his decision not to undergo more operations and so, he thinks, finally to die and thereby free her. But some crucial evidence is missing. Stolid Jan exposes Bess's first tale of sex as made up; her second, real foray (masturbating a bemused local at the back of the bus) she sanitizes by retelling it to Jan as if she were doing it to him. We never see Jan's reactions to the later increasingly squalid and dangerous episodes. Is he titillated, as he claims he will be, or is he secretly horrified? We hear others state that his mind has darkened and that he is leading her downward; Jan himself scrawls on his writing tablet, "LET ME DIE I'M EVIL IN HEAD." Does he actually come to take pleasure from the accounts? Or is he merely repeating the judgment that others have passed on him? Jan's true nature remains opaque in a way it shouldn't, and the needed information is probably lying on the cutting room floor.

Also disappointing are the scenes in the forbidden freighter, which are hokey and full of the empty menace of comic book villainy. Von Trier has literally pulled his punches here. It's not enough just to vamp old movies; the representation of these men's violence must be as powerful and direct as the representation of the sexual love Bess and Jan express for each other. The brutal fact that they beat her to death cannot be softened or avoided; it is part of the suffering groundwork essential to the film's emotional veracity. As it stands, Bess's death scene, along with the actual fact of her death, seems as unreal and contrived as the characters who are supposed to have brought it about.

These missing links affect our understanding of other characters as well as the basic premise of the film. For if it's the case that only Jan appreciates the extreme nature of Bess's love, only he who is her equal in love, then is it the young doctor-kind, unwilling to exploit Bess sexually, finally in love with her-who is aligned with the forces of evil? The doctor is willing to lock her up in the same way and for the same reasons that brought about her incarceration before, reasons that he himself at first rejects ("It's natural to show what you feel," he says glibly) until he sees the direction Bess's "natural feelings" are leading her in. At her inquest he seems about to recant when he informs the bewigged jurists that what he has written in Bess's medical record ("immature," "neurotic," etc.) should simply be replaced by the word "good." In the face of their stony incomprehension, however, he backs down once again into the safety of diagnostic labels.

I remember having a late modernist reaction akin to that experienced by the young doctor on my first viewing of von Trier's earlier film Zentropa. After the initial shock of realizing that every image, every character and set in the film was drawn secondhand from period 1940s movies of World War II rather than from "life" (as we naively imagine a realist movie or novel is), I settled into a grumpy frame of mind thatjudged what I was seeing to be pretentious, derivative noir and didn't stick with it longer than half an hour. The second time I watched straight through to its haunting end, when the hero, a German-American who has come to Germany directly after the war, drowns in a Nazi underground terrorist attack that blows up the train where he has labored as a lowly conductor. As his backlit body floats leisurely beneath the surface of the river, a poem of Brecht's called "The Drowned Girl" came irresistibly to mind ("When she was drowned and floating in the great river, up in heaven the sun shone brilliantly, as if it wanted to pacify the corpse"), and I began to understand that here was an artist at work who was more than a little like Kafka. Below the surface of stylized events and characters in Zentropa swims the outline of a myth, a dark myth that, like the later film, takes an innocent on a journey into evil. And like Breaking the Waves, it also contains the distinctive transcendental element, transmitted by cliche, that radically separates von Trier's work from modernism and postmodernism alike. Brecht, of course, hated exalted imagery and couldn't wait to puncture his false promise by recounting how God proceeded to forget the corpse part by body part until she is nothing but rotting meat in the river. But von Trier wants us to feel that the darkness which overwhelms the protagonist of Zentropa gets overwhelmed in turn by Bess (his second main character whose body ends up underwater) in Breaking the Waves.

Von Trier's other preceding work, a campy Danish TV miniseries called The Kingdom, would doubtless provide the ultimate proof, to his detractors, of this director's frivolity. One would not want to assign too much meaning to this mischievous morphing of bodies and souls, leavened with some bracing inter-Scandinavian stereotype bashing, whose sole moral appears to be something on the order of: Don't build your hospital on a medieval bleaching marsh. Instead there is the exhilaration of wild and crazy improvisation (it must have been the most tremendous fun to write and shoot), an inspired bit of spitballing in which von Trier pits beleaguered doctors representing a social order built on rational principles in a losing battle against a bewildering barrage of outrageously supernatural events.

Breaking the Waves, this director's most mature work, brings to mind finally the fairytale atmospheres, one perverse and one sentimental, of two very different classic short stories out of the Anglo-American tradition: H.H. Munro's "The Monkey's Paw" (in which an old couple wish on an Indian amulet for their son's return home and he arrives dead after a factory accident) and 0. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" (in which a newlywed husband and wife each sacrifice the thing they hold most dear to buy the other a Christmas gift, but what they've given can only be used with the treasured possession sacrificed). It is this kind of fairytale logic that balances the plot of Breaking the Waves on Bess's two wishes: first that Jan come home and second that he not die. These wishes become externalized forces acting omnisciently in the world of this story, forces through which Bess causes Jan to be paralyzed, then causes him to live and walk again. Thus Bess's greatest sin, as she completely understands, was committed long before Jan's accident, not after. In Shakespearean (and expressionist) terms, her excessive love has upset the natural order-the Tao, if you will- of the larger world around her, thereby setting up a disturbance in the environment conducive to Jan's accident. For this transgression she must atone. And atone she does, transforming herself in the process into a female Christ cum Mary Magdalen. Stoned by children, the outcast Bess is only too prepared to take up her cross, here a sluggish motorbike she must drag up a Scottish Golgotha to the bleak chapel of her forefathers. Her role-playing dialogues with God-an exercise in piety the late Gestaltist godfather Fritz Perls would have doubtless heartily endorsed-reinforce our sense of a God the Father/Bess the Daughter revisionism that triumphantly demolishes her fellow parishioners' lifequenching patriarchalism. (As a friend once wittily remarked of the Scottish temperament, "You have to dig through all that ice before you hit the granite.") The young doctor vainly tries cajoling Bess out of her convictions by teasing her: "What powers you possess!" But in the subjective expressionist universe of Breaking the Waves she does, she does.