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Breaking the Waves

Breaking the Waves

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Customer Reviews

Breaking the Waves is a Love Story Within a Love Story.

Rating: 5/5

Set in a remote, repressed, and deeply-religious community in the 1970s Scottish Highlands, Danish film director Lars von Trier's film, Breaking the Waves (1996), chronicles the unusual love story between Bess McNeill (Emily Watson) and her husband, Jan (Stellan Skarsgård). The film is the first in von Trier's "Golden Heart Trilogy," which also includes The Idiots (1998) and Dancer in the Dark (2000). Bess talks to God. In fact, she has two-way conversations with him. After Jan is paralyzed from the neck down in an oil-rigging accident, she believes that it is God's will that she engage in sex with other men so that she may then share all of the details with Jan. Her faith in God leads Bess to believe that this will cure her husband of his paralysis. She is further convinced that the more deviant she becomes in her sexual behaviour, the more likely it will be that God will heal Jan. She goes places where even the village prostitutes refuse to go.

The mesmerising film shows von Trier's realist Dogme 95 influences: hand-held photography, grainy images, and natural lighting, but it is not a true Dogme 95 film (it was not filmed on location). How good is Breaking the Waves? Roger Ebert and Martin Scorsese both named it as one of the ten best films of the 1990s. Breaking the Waves won the Grand Prix at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, and Emily Watson's mesmerizing performance was nominated for the 1996 Academy Award for Best Actress. This rare, fascinating film explores emotional depths with honesty, and is highly recommended. Its raw emotional power will leave audiences divided. What more can we expect from a truly great film?

G. Merritt

What Would You Do For Love?

Rating: 5/5

Emily Watson plays an innocently naive, very religious, and perhaps slow-witted young newly-wed dealing with love for God, her Family, and her husband within her old-fashioned and intolerant Scottish community. The film is mostly shot in grainy black & white, but it has beautifully scenic color intermissions with snippets of phrases taken from various Beattles' songs that are relevant to the next section of the story as it unfolds. Also, more of the film is shot in color as the intensity of the situation rises. The ending is all at once tragic, poignant, hopeful, and metaphysical. A great film to watch alone on a quiet, rainy afternoon.

about the DVDfilm/movie breaking the waves.......

Rating: 4/5

The story is basically an oil rig worker get married to a woman he loves and they had good times together and then he has to part with his wife temporary and had to get back to oil rig to work but he finally get into accident on the job which led to be neckcuffed and bedridden with a hard chance of recovery. He later asked his wife to look for someone and have sex as to make her happy buy she went on sex with other man which the last one caused her to be serously hurt and landed in hospital where she later died. Her Husband was later seen recovering from the accident and had her body thropwn and buried in the sea where he works. Recommended to those whom are interested in this genre of film/movie. This woman in this film acting as Bess had some phycological problem where she had delusion about things and her husband, ian whom was suffering from accident in the movie.

Breaking the Waves

Review by:


Dr, MR Franc MBBS (PhD) GPS Ang Poon Kah
director 'lou Ye'- Ang Poon Kah for film summer palace.

A masterpiece from Lars von Trier...

Rating: 5/5

One of the best films of 1996, this is a story of love that knows no boundaries, and of sacrifice. Emily Watson gives the performance of her career as Bess, a simple woman who has just married Jan, played by Stellan Skarsgard. Within the boundaries of their marriage, Bess discovers the gift of physical love that she had never known before. From this moment on, she cannot bear to be away from her husband and constantly cries when he is away. Bess is also a devout Christian, and is always praying to God, asking him questions and turning to him for comfort.

When Jan is the victim of a tragic oil rig accident that leaves him paralyzed, he is no longer able to make love to Bess. He then asks her to do something very sketchy: he asks her to go out and make love with perfect strangers, and then come to him with all of the details. His motivations for this seem sort of strange, and it is never quite clear why he asks her to do this. However, being the simpleton and the loving individual that she is, she fulfills what he asks her to do. In her mind, she believes that it is her duty as a wife, and so she becomes something of a prostitute. She believes that her actions will heal her husband. As a result of her promiscuous behavior, she is cast out of her church and abandoned by her family. The children throw rocks at her, and the townsfolk want nothing to do with her. All she has from this point on are God, her husband, and her overly protective best friend. Still, she presses on with her mission, which she believes is God's will for her life. It all leads to a tragic - yet extremely powerful - ending.

While I do not believe for one second that God would ask one of his children to sacrifice themselves in that fashion, that really is not the point of this film. Lars Von Trier has given us a strong message here. Bess puts her love and her life on the line, just as Christ did for all of humanity. See this film and try to look beyond the disturbing, graphic material to see the bigger picture. When I first read about this film - being a fan of Lars Von Trier's work - I was extremely reluctant to view it.

Now, I have to say, I am glad that I did.

Hang in there; this is a touching movie which can be hard to watch

Rating: 5/5

Hang in there! This is a touching movie that can be very hard to watch. For me, it was about following your own inner guidance, and being true to yourself 100%.

Don't start watching this movie unless you have enough time set aside to finish it. I found this movie to be touching and moving. And it was hard to watch for much of the movie. I suggest that you read very little about the movie before watching it, and just trust others who recommend it.

Also, this movie is not for children or teens.