Holy Motors

November 4, 2018October 30, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Holy Motors (2012)

Dir. Leos Carax

Written by: Leos Carax

Starring: Denis Lavant, Edith Scob

I’ll never forget my initial attempts to see Holy Motors, a movie that I knew nothing about from a French filmmaker whom I’d never heard of, at the Three Rivers Film Festival in 2012. The film festival, organized by Pittsburgh Filmmakers every October, is an event that I look forward to as an opportunity to catch up on the year’s small indies, arthouse releases, and foreign films that didn’t find their way into wide distribution. I often go into these movies blind, choosing from the three dozen odd films based mostly on their paragraph-long blurbs on the Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ website, and this was certainly the case with Holy Motors. The promotional image chosen, of Edith Scob’s Celine donning an unsettling mask meant to be a direct homage to the French horror classic Eyes Without A Face, was enough to sell me on Holy Motors as the one movie that I absolutely had to see at the film festival that year. I tried twice to make that happen, and twice my screening had to be aborted due to projection issues. Each time, I got far enough into Leos Carax’s surrealist fairytale for it to fully sink its claws into me, and, each time, I was disappointed when I couldn’t experience the ending of this one-of-a-kind cinematic experience. I had to purchase Holy Motors on DVD a few months later when it was released just so I could see the movie in its entirety, and it is one of the most satisfying movie purchases that I’ve made in the last decade. Holy Motors is nothing short of a masterpiece of absurdity, with Carax proudly bearing the surrealist torch. It’s a unique movie experience, and one that might not be easily digested by many or most audiences, but it is, nonetheless, one of my favorite films of the 21^st century.

Holy Motors begins in a place of incoherence, with its opening scene featuring a character named “The Sleeper (Carax),” who rises from his slumber, approaches a hidden door in his bedroom wall (which resembles a forest), and opens it, stepping into a crowded cinema. The Sleeper looks down from the cinema’s balcony, where he stands alone, observing a small boy and a giant dog who prowl the aisles, as the film begins. We then meet Mr. Oscar (Lavant) who exits his home, a brutalist compound patrolled by armed guards, and is picked up in a stretch limousine driven by Céline (Scob). As the two drive away, Céline reminds Mr. Oscar of the number of appointments he has that day, and refers him to a dossier which contains the details thereof. When he arrives at his first appointment, Mr. Oscar emerges from the limousine wearing heavy prosthetics, dressed like a crone, and walking, stooped, with the assistance of a cane. On this assignment, he begs for a while, lamenting the status of the old beggar woman, forgotten and ignored by all who pass, and then returns to the limousine where he removes the false nose and teeth, preparing for his next assignment. In this assignment, Mr. Oscar accesses a high security facility, donning a motion-capture suit, and performs a seductive dance with an actress, which is revealed to be the basis of a computer animation that has turned them both into water dragons. The film continues in this way with Mr. Oscar going from assignment to assignment, assuming various roles and performing a series of vignettes, many of which are absurdist or surreal in nature. While the film continues to defy strict narrative continuity, a thematic coherence begins to emerge, with Mr. Oscar’s assignments standing for film genres and his job emerging as that of the actor and audience surrogate.

I’ve written before about my love for movies about movies and movie-making, but Holy Motors is a tour de force of meta commentary and heady, involved film theory. This is a movie made for those who love to speculate about the role of art and media, and film, specifically, in the life of the individual and within society. It’s a veritable buffet of sumptuous imagery and provocative narrative posturing. Carax, who is importantly positioned as The Sleeper in the film’s first scene, seems to be casting his gaze across the spectrum of visual media and casting a judgment upon society’s use of film as a distraction and as a communication medium. It’s a movie that I didn’t completely understand when I first saw it, and one that I still don’t claim to have mastered. I could go to its deep well of philosophical import a hundred times and find myself drawing new insights. I think that this mystery is what made me want to go back after my initial screening cut the film off before its end, and then made me want to purchase the film after my second screening experience was botched, as well. I didn’t need to go back to Holy Motors to gain some sense of narrative completion, but rather to wash myself in its utter strangeness time and time again, and to see how Carax would tie all of these disparate, surrealist threads together in the end. I was less interested in figuring out the film’s story as I was in exploring its philosophical home base. Carax’s film opens itself up to a wide number of interpretations from a film theory standpoint. It’s just as easily read as a treatise on screen theory and the role of the spectator as it is an examination of film genres, or on post-modernism and the role of the traditional film in 21^st century society, at all. As a critic, I love to wrap myself in the film’s layers and feel its all-encompassing content engulfing my brain.

Holy Motors is an invigorating and rewarding deep dive for theory nerds, but it still retains the pleasures of watching a breezy, if sometimes inscrutable, piece of entertainment. While the film’s structure and loosely-plotted nature might turn off some casual viewers, I think that most people would find quite a bit to like about Holy Motors. For starters, Lavant puts in a great, understated performance. Though he doesn’t have a great deal of dialogue, he provides a blank template upon which the various “assignments” that Mr. Oscar acts out can exist, and those “assignments” leap into life on the screen. One early role, M. Merde, stands out as particularly memorable, with Lavant ditching the elegance of his choreographed motion capture lovemaking in favor of the animalistic, gestural M. Merde who arrives into the film as an agent of chaos. Clad in a shabby green suit, his skin and shockingly orange hair covered in filth and grime, M. Merde crawls out from a sewer, and shambles his way through a cemetery, where he feasts on graveside flowers and assaulting mourners before stumbling upon a fashion shoot. He crashes the photo shoot, kidnapping the model (Eva Mendes), and secrets her away to his subterranean lair where the two smoke cigarettes, and M. Merde eats various non-food substances, including money and the model’s hair. He then fashions her dress into a burqa and leads her deeper into the cave where he strips naked, climbing into her lap and reclining in a pose that is not dissimilar to Michelangelo’s “Pieta.” The scene is profane, perverse, and purposefully obfuscates meaning, but there is obviously some deep theological and artistic significance to this reference, and it is also absurdly comical in its trashy nature.

Contrast this moment with one later in the film in which Mr. Oscar meets up with a former scene partner (and perhaps lover) on the way to one of his last assignments. In this scene, Lavant plays Mr. Oscar naturalistically, free of any of his previous affections. He has been aged up for the role, but otherwise isn’t heavily made up. He and Eva Grace (Kylie Minogue) reminisce about their work and time together as they leisurely explore an abandoned and crumbling hotel. The faded opulence surrounding the characters reflects the maudlin song that Eva Grace sings, the refrain of which, “Who were we when we were who we were back then?” in turn reflects the shifting nature of these characters’ identities. Who, indeed, were they when they were important to one another, and what weight does that importance really carry if they were only playing out roles. The camera largely follows Eva Grace with Mr. Oscar following behind her, somnambulant, reticent. It’s a far cry from the aggression and grotesquery with which Lavant played M. Merde. It’s fitting, though, and shows off his range well. Though little is made explicit about their relationship in the scene, the tenderness with which Mr. Oscar holds Eva Grace, and the devotion in his eyes when he watches her perform the song tell the tale well enough. Minogue’s windswept performance is every bit as dramatic as something from a Hollywood musical, and the brief scene gives the film its heart, without ever delving into the details of the pair’s history. Carax is able to create a swell of feeling by manipulating a combination of these great subdued performances, Minogue’s expressive singing voice, a beautiful swell of well-timed strings, and a deeply evocative setting. It’s movie-making 101. Coming near the end of a film that has so wildly veered into experimental territory, this conventional scene surprisingly doesn’t feel out of place, but on the contrary provides the film with its emotional climax.

Though its surrealist veneer and artsy trappings would likely prove difficult for many viewers to overcome, Holy Motors is the type of varied movie experience that anyone who likes movies should be able to draw some enjoyment from. It contains a handful of moments of high drama, a lot of absurdist comedy as well as sharp satire, and it borrows liberally from science fiction, horror, and action films. It’s a broad and multi-faceted piece of art that seeks to examine why people choose the distractions and the entertainments that they do, and whether film as an entertainment has the hold on the collective imagination in the 21^st century that it did in the century before. In addition to being so rich with meaning for cineastes, the film is well-acted, visually sumptuous, and thematically engaging. While not every viewer might respond to the film’s metaphor of the cinema as an aging and dying art form, surely most can relate to Mr. Oscar’s concerns about his own obsolescence as he transitions into middle age, or to Céline’s obvious care and concern for Mr. Oscar, a man who she can never really know. If nothing else, its individual vignettes provide brief moments of engagement that, when taken separately, don’t add up to much, but prove that even the most esoteric of films is an entertainment, because the process of engaging with movies is fun. What makes Holy Motors successful is that even its most absurdist moments are grounded in a bedrock of strong realism, and that as convoluted as its structure and narrative might become, it continues to draw inspiration from the familiar tropes of genre films. It’s a reach for me to say that Holy Motors is accessible, because it really isn’t, but it’s so richly rewarding that I just want more people to see it. It’s the type of movie that reminds me why I fell in love with movies to begin with. It’s a big, all-encompassing, genre-bending work of art, and I want it to get as much admiration as possible.

Fata Morgana

April 29, 2018April 26, 2018 / andrewmisk / 3 Comments

Fata Morgana (1971)

Dir. Werner Herzog

Written by: Werner Herzog

I think that Fata Morgana has to be one of the most unique films that I’ve screened thus far for this project. I don’t have a great deal of experience in writing about documentary or non-narrative experimental films, both in this project, and in general, so it should be an interesting process trying to find the verbiage to record my thoughts on what was a truly different film viewing experience. Fata Morgana has its predecessors, particularly in experimental science-fiction films like La Jetee, and I can certainly see the influence that this film has had on a generation of experimental filmmakers, but I don’t know that I have ever seen a movie that was quite like Fata Morgana. Leave it to an outsider and a visionary like Werner Herzog to have created a film that is unlike any other, and to have done it so early in his career. Fata Morgana is at once weird, beautiful, esoteric, and hypnotic.

Herzog and a small crew shot Fata Morgana in the Sahara Desert in the late 1960s without any real plan for how to edit the footage together or how it would be assembled into a coherent narrative. “Fata morgana” refers to the unusual instances of faint mirages that pop up above the horizon line in deserts and on the ocean, and in the film, Herzog captures several of these in slow tracking shots that take in the barren desert landscape. The film also includes some brief interludes with human subjects, but the bulk of its visuals are landscapes. Early in the film, Herzog sets these stunningly beautiful images to a voiceover narration by German critic Lotte Eisner reading a version of a Mayan creation myth, the Popol Vuh, which Herzog has adapted. Later he introduces the music of Leonard Cohen, giving the images a more grounded feeling, while the creation myth used in the film’s first half elevates the images to a more ethereal significance.

On its surface, Fata Morgana is a very simple film, consisting simply of placid images and sporadic bits of voiceover. However, as you watch the film, the images start to add up to a more complex narrative, giving each other context and significance. Herzog had initially envisioned the film as a science-fiction film about a dying planet, and it’s easy to see how that could have been accomplished. The depopulated landscapes of the Sahara that Herzog and his camera operator, Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, film certainly feel cold and alien. The way the mirages that they capture flicker at the horizon line, it’s easy to get the sense that there is some great secret, or a hidden civilization, existing just outside the frame. Herzog shows us rotting animal corpses and the rusting wreckage of aircraft, furthering the impression that we are observing the death of a once-great civilization. Eisner’s narration, however, provides counterpoint to the barrenness of the images, giving the impression that if these are the ruins of a long-dead civilization, they are destined to be the site of a blossoming of the next society. Her recitation of the Popul Vuh gives the mirages a hopeful, if somewhat portentious, feeling.

As the film progresses, a more explicit narrative starts to emerge as the nature of Herzog’s images changes and he abandons the creation myth in favor of the soft music of Leonard Cohen. My mind couldn’t help but drift to thoughts of colonization and the exploitation of the African continent for centuries when the images began to shift away from an exploration of the natural world of the Sahara and towards a more industrial, urban landscape. Midway through the film, Schmidt-Reitwein’s camera begins to focus more intently on construction sites and the frames of buildings, the skeletons of heavy industry. Flickering mirages give way eventually to the ghosts of Europe’s colonial influence on the continent. Herzog interviews a German scientist holding a monitor lizard, who talks about the unique ecosystem of the desert, and its importance for his studies of the lizards. I felt like his attitude towards Africa as a strange, exotic place, useful only for his scholarly pursuits was quite pejorative, and it indicates a new, less obvious form of paternalism and colonialism. Though anti-colonialist sentiments aren’t made explicit in any way in the film, I have to think that revolution and colonialism were on Herzog’s mind as he made Fata Morgana, as it was partially shot in Cameroon during that country’s war for independence.

Of course, by their very nature, movies like Fata Morgana are wide open for various interpretations. The film was one of the first popular psychedelic experimental films, and I have to think that experiencing it on psychedelics would only enhance the film’s multitude of possible interpretations. The images in the film are hallucinatory and mesmerizing, with the same framings or locations often being repeated with slight variations, furthering their dreamlike nature. Divorced from explicit context or explanation, the images invite the audience to provide their own narratives, spinning them out into collective dreams. While Herzog undoubtedly had an idea in his head about the meaning of the film that he had carefully constructed, he left so much room for interpretation that, like the mirages it depicts, Fata Morgana can appear to be many different things to many different people. It’s a movie that I would be very interested in seeing in a crowded theater, because I think that the reactions to it would be varied and passionate. I think that most people would either dismiss the movie as weird and esoteric, or they would strongly identify with it, having pasted their own experiences and viewpoints onto its beautiful landscapes, imbuing it with a highly personal meaning.

Though Herzog continues to work prolifically in documentary and his filmography is peppered with instances of formal and narrative experimentation, Fata Morgana is certainly the most explicitly experimental Herzog film that I have ever seen. The film is a product of its montage, with the images being stripped of their context, and therefore being opened up to interpretation and the influence of the viewer’s mind and experience. The fata morgana depicted in the film also become tabula rasa. The film invites intent and engaged viewership, but also offers a sort of hypnotic, sedative quality, as the images and the narration and, eventually, music, wash over the viewer. This is a thinking person’s stoner film, and one that will definitely stick around in your consciousness for a little while after a screening. This is one of my shorter posts about a movie in a while, but not because Fata Morgana isn’t worthy of deep discussion and consideration, both as a formative feature-length experimental film, and within Herzog’s filmography, but because I don’t feel that I really have an adequate vocabulary to really describe the film’s uniqueness. It’s a movie that deserves to be more watched, particularly by people who are fans of midnight movies like Koyaanisqatsi and Body Song. It’s a cinematic trip well worth taking, and one that will likely open up your mind to new ways of engaging with cinema as art.

Dogville

January 28, 2018January 24, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Dogville (2003)

Dir. Lars von Trier

Written by: Lars von Trier

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Paul Bettany

Dogville, in which a stranger named Grace (Kidman), stumbles into a remote town in the mountains of Colorado, where she is reluctantly accepted into a cloistered society and discovers that behind many acts of human kindness there lies an avaricious motive, may be Lars von Trier’s defining masterpiece. The film marries the Danish auteur’s dark thematic explorations with the most radical example of his challenging and ever-evolving visual style. It’s a film that has challenged me since I first viewed it shortly after its release, sometime during my freshman year of college. Like the other von Trier films that I’ve written about, Dogville is a difficult film to “enjoy,” due to its dark and depressing subject matter, but it stands out as a startling and immediate piece of art. The film strips away the artifices of traditional cinema, replacing them with a starkly minimalist visual aesthetic that utilizes chalk outlines on a soundstage to block out its only setting. This extreme minimalism allows von Trier to focus in on the film’s narrative and dig deep into the roots of human nature, revealing a pessimistic, challenging world view that shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who is familiar with the director’s oeuvre. Dogville is a profound film, seeking to explore aspects of the human condition rarely considered, and despite its barren aesthetic, it’s often a beautiful film. It’s an emotionally taxing, mentally exhausting experience to watch, but its host of strong performances and von Trier’s artful directorial choices make for an engaging, unforgettable film.

Dogville is a tale told in nine elliptical chapters and a prologue, in which we are first introduced to the residents of Dogville, Colorado, a mining town hard hit by the Great Depression. Our guide to the town is young Tom Edison (Bettany), a self-styled writer who has rarely put pen to paper, but who doesn’t shy away from trying to inflict his own morality and high-mindedness on the often resistant townsfolk of Dogville. Early in the film, Tom is walking the town’s main street at night when he comes upon a stranger, Grace, who is on the run from a gang that Tom had previously heard firing shots in the valley below the town. Tom agrees to shelter her, but he must first convince the rest of Dogville’s residents to keep Grace secreted away from harm in their village, and many of them are less than eager to put their own safety and tranquility on the line to harbor a stranger, particularly one who may be dangerous herself. However, they eventually consent to offer Grace a trial period, provided that she earn her keep in the town by doing housework and chores for each of its residents. This arrangement continues well for some time, as Grace proves herself to be an asset to the town, and nearly all of the townsfolk begin to warm to her presence, particularly Tom with whom Grace begins a tentative romance. However, the situation begins to become more tenuous and dissolve when Grace’s pursuers, as well as the local police who are in the pocket of the gang, come sniffing around town, raising the stakes for the people of Dogville. Their initial welcoming attitude begins to gradually turn to resentment and suspicion of Grace, as the townsfolk’s true nature starts to reveal itself as they inflict an escalating series of cruelties on the stranger.

This is von Trier at his most radically experimental, as he’s fully abandoned the realist tendencies of the Dogme 95 movement that he helped to spark nearly a decade earlier, creating a fully stylized and symbolic, if completely minimalist, visual aesthetic. Von Trier has mentioned that his choice to adopt such radical and theatrical staging for his film was an attempt to strip away the distractions of setting so that audiences would focus on the characters, the narrative, and the performances. Another side effect of this chosen visual aesthetic is that it makes the film immediately engaging because it is such a radical departure from the visual presentation of any sort of traditional narrative film. Taking a page from famed theatrical provocateur Bertolt Brecht’s playbook, and staying true to his own theory that cinema should be “as a rock in your shoe,” von Trier presents the audience with a set of distancing effects that counter-intuitively work to foster audience engagement and identification. As there is little to recognize about the physical setting of the film, audiences have no choice but to deeply and personally invest themselves in the characters and their highly-charged chamber dramas. In Brechtian theory, this would then cause the audience member to internalize the performances and undergo a sort of self-reflection, unearthing heretofore unknown truths. As a highly analytical and critical filmmaker, von Trier no doubt is seeking the same sort of agitation and self-examination in his audience, and if they take the lessons and attitudes of the characters in Dogville to heart, the truths that they find reflected may be challenging, to say the least.

Perhaps this is why Dogville is such a difficult and divisive film, appearing on many best and worst films of the year lists when it was released. The suppositions that it makes about human nature, and in particular, about the American national spirit, are confrontational and challenging, if not down-right appalling. Dogville finds von Trier at perhaps his most misanthropic, sometimes giving the impression that he sees the characters (and perhaps even the actors portraying them) in this morality fable as specimens to be studied, rather than humanistic equals. The coldness that he shows towards his subjects is reflected in the coldness that is revealed to be at the core of their beings. Dogville is a film without any “good guys,” where no good deed goes unpunished, and the strong ultimately lord over the weak and powerless. The quickness with which the townsfolk turn to abusing, and taking advantage of Grace is horrifying, and the savagery to which they descend is shocking, but to von Trier, those traits are true to the selfish, rapacious nature of the human animal. We have seen before in his films that his worldview is bleak and uncompromising, but in Dogville there are no pure souls, no Selma or Bess, to point towards the existence of decency or goodness in the world. When Grace finally gains her comeuppance on the townsfolk and watches them murdered and the town burned, there’s little satisfaction in the revenge for the audience, because it is we that she is dispatching of, at the same time that it is we who are gleeful in the killing. Audiences are indicted as killers regardless of whom they choose to identify with, and are left with a preponderance of difficult questions about their own position on the nature of human kindness and charity.

Even in a film so bleak, however, and so coldly antihuman, there are many moments of warmth, primarily supplied by the excellent performances of the cast. Although there are several great performances in Dogville, Nicole Kidman owns this movie with her performance as Grace. Released at the same time that she was starring in prestige period films such as Cold Mountain and The Hours, for which she won an Academy Award, Kidman’s performance in Dogville seems to sometimes get overlooked. Perhaps it is the film’s overall divisiveness that led to Kidman not receiving much mainstream consideration for awards or commendations, but what vibrancy there is in the film is directly related to her performance. Kidman is radiant in the film, both in her performance and physically, as she is often shot in golden light that reflects in her red hair and seems to make her personage glow. Early in the film, her kindness is palpable and it begins to seep into the dark crevices of Dogville, inflicting itself onto the town’s hardened residents. The film also requires Kidman to demonstrate extreme range as an actor, as her character is taken on an extreme emotional journey over the course of the film, experiencing and embodying fear, happiness, humble service, love, distress, resignation, shame, and moral vengefulness, among many other complex and difficult to convey emotional states. Though the performance may not be as singularly memorable as Bjork’s in Dancer in the Dark, Kidman’s Grace is equally as impressive. The performance is less outwardly expressive and showy, more inwardly-focused and nuanced.

Kidman headlines an impressive assemblage of talent, with several other standouts in supporting roles. Von Trier is often able to find himself working with some of Europe and America’s finest actors, and though they don’t always find the experience of working with the famously irritable and demanding director to be a pleasant one, he usually draws great performances out of already talented actors. Dogville is no exception, with famous character actors such as Ben Gazzara and Philip Baker Hall turning in great performances as lonely, but ultimately reprehensible, older men, alongside film legend Lauren Bacall whose Ma Ginger at first seems to be a sweet, if reclusive, matriarch, but whose vitriol becomes evident by the film’s end. Of course von Trier regular, Stellan Skarsgård, makes an appearance as Chuck, a hard working father who resents Grace for what she represents as an outsider who had previously enjoyed a life of luxury. Chuck is the member of the town who harbors the most outward animosity towards Grace, and Skarsgård plays him terrifyingly well, embodying seething resentment and a physical type of malice. John Hurt’s familiar, soothing voice is used to great effect as the film’s narrator, helping to set the scene, and providing near-ironic counterpoint through his calm voiceover narration of events that are rapidly descending into cruelty. In fact, nearly all of the film’s supporting cast stand out in some way, with Kidman’s co-lead, Paul Bettany, being one of the more forgettable aspects of the film. He is fine as the naïve, moralizing Tom, but he doesn’t really add much to the film through his performance. I don’t say that to diminish Bettany’s performance, but more to point out how difficult it is to stand out among a field of such accomplished actors.

Von Trier handles the ensemble cast masterfully, though. His earlier films were often focused on highly intimate and personal narratives that centered on a dynamic female protagonist, and though Dogville certainly is that, the film sees von Trier expanding that focus to provide the sort of character depth and interiority that he previously explored on the individual level to a society. He allows the audience to get to know the citizens of Dogville gradually, affording each one enough screen time to develop their own personality, and to properly inform their motivations and behaviors. He’s brought in actors intuitive enough to make the most of small gestures or bits of terse dialogue, and the result is a town that actually feels as if it could exist. In spite of its lack of visual specificity, Dogville is clearly mapped out, quite literally, and the interactions and relationships existing between its residents feel true to life. Their petty disputes, and their over-familiarity with one another will ring true to anyone who has spent time living in a small town, and perhaps this is what makes their monstrous turn in the film’s second half all the more disturbing. The people of Dogville are people that we, the audience, know. Again, they are us. Dogville is a studied portrait of the callousness of modern human society, from the perspective of a filmmaker who often doesn’t include himself in the larger strictures of human society, and though its scope may be played out on a more violent and even Biblical scale, it hits the nail on the head at the rottenness that is often at the core of people’s petty slights and swipes at their neighbors.

Dogville is not a film for most people. It’s too avant-garde, too pretentious, too graphic, too nihilistic and misanthropic, to really cater to many audiences. Obviously, I am in the camp that considers it a masterpiece, which really shouldn’t be surprising given my affinity for von Trier’s other films. I don’t necessarily agree with the film’s totally bleak take on human nature and society, but I appreciate its provocative stance and von Trier’s willingness to be totally unrelenting in his vision, both aesthetically and in terms of his presented worldview. I enjoy films like this, ones that force their spectators to question aspects of their own identity or their own nature. I think that for every film that celebrates the beauty of life or of art, there should be another artfully challenging those assumptions and presenting necessary counterpoint. Life certainly isn’t all sunshine and flowers, and neither should our art be. Though I don’t recommend that anyone, myself included, watch Dogville often, I do think that it’s a film that people should at least try to engage with once in their life. It’s a stylistically audacious work of art that seeks to shake viewers out of their complacency and challenge their core beliefs. It’s a good thing to be shaken up from time to time.

Breaking the Waves

July 30, 2017July 30, 2017 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Breaking the Waves (1996)

Dir. Lars von Trier

Written by: Lars von Trier

Starring: Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgård, Katrin Cartlidge

Breaking the Waves is one of the films in my collection that I have watched the least. I picked the film up on Bluray a few years ago during one of Barnes and Nobles’s periodic half price Criterion Collection sales. I have been following the career of Lars von Trier since seeing Dancer in the Dark shortly after it was released, but to that point I had never seen Breaking the Waves, one of his most celebrated films, so I decided to take a chance on the purchase. I watched the movie shortly after buying it, and I was very impressed by its emotionally affective morality fable, and by Emily Watson’s heartbreaking performance as Bess, a naïve young woman who sacrifices everything in an attempt to please and heal her ailing husband. Since that initial viewing, I have only watched Breaking the Waves one other time before watching it for this project, simply because, like many of von Trier’s films, it is an incredibly difficult watch. The film’s beauty and artistic merit are without question, but its subject matter and emotional brutality make for an uncomfortable viewing experience.

Set in a small village on the northern coast of Scotland in the early 1970s, Breaking the Waves begins with the wedding of Bess (Watson) and Jan (Skarsgård). The Calvinist elders of the village don’t approve of this marriage as they are distrustful of outsiders, and Jan, a Scandinavian who has come to their village to work on an oil rig, is certainly an outsider. The tall, hard-drinking Jan, and Bess, who is devoutly religious and meek, make for an odd couple, but their marriage seems genuinely happy. Bess matches her religious devotion with a new-found devotion to her husband, and begins to find herself in a new context through Jan’s introduction of a previously forbidden sexuality into her life. When their honeymoon phase comes to an end and Jan has to go back to work on the rig, Bess comforts herself in prayer, giving voice to her own wants and concerns as well as God’s responses. While at sea, Jan suffers a head injury and is returned to Bess immobilized and confined to a hospital bed. Possessing of a childlike faith, Bess believes that her prayers for Jan’s early return from the oil rig are the cause of his injury, and, feeling guilty, she seeks a way that she might be able to heal him. Bess also begins to believe that she and Jan have a metaphysical connection, through both action and prayer. Jan suggests that Bess take another lover and then describe their sexual encounters to him, telling her that if she does this, it will help him to get better. Bess secretly begins prostituting herself, hoping in vain that through her debasement, the man she loves will be healed. Though her friends and family, including her sister-in-law (Cartlidge) who is also Jan’s nurse, caution her against her actions, insisting that she is being used by Jan, Bess persists, hoping that she can bring about a miracle.

Von Trier often groups his films into sets and trilogies, and Breaking the Waves is the first film in what he calls his “Golden Heart” trilogy. It is followed by The Idiots, which I haven’t seen, and Dancer in the Dark, which I will be writing about for this project in time. These films are all influenced by a fairytale that von Trier read as a child in which a little girl is lost in the woods and gives away everything she owns to those who are needier than she is, and they all explore themes of exploitation, martyrdom, and absolution. Though he experienced critical success throughout Europe from the beginning of his career, Breaking the Waves marks von Trier’s first crossover success, with the film receiving near-unanimous praise from critics, winning the Grand Prix at Cannes, as well as garnering an Academy Award nomination for its star. The film also marks the genesis of the criticism of von Trier for perceived misogyny and exploitation of his female leads. Though von Trier has countered these criticisms, claiming that his female protagonists are representations of his own feminine side, there is certainly an argument to be made that the female protagonists of von Trier’s films are unfairly and sadistically treated, particularly in the “Golden Heart” trilogy. I’m not sure exactly whether I think that von Trier is a sadist or a misogynist, or if he is simply interested in documenting some of the baser, crueler aspects of human relations as a reflection of his own mental anguish. Watching his films often makes me uncomfortable, which is absolutely his intention as a filmmaker. He has often stated that his intention is to create films that are a “stone in your shoe,” that are provocative in both style and subject matter, and that lead the audience to consider positions or truths that may be unsettling. Breaking the Waves is certainly successful in this respect, and as uncomfortable as it might be to watch, it is often a beautiful and profound film.

Arriving just over a year after von Trier’s announcement of the Dogme 95 manifesto, a set of rules announcing a new experimental cinema movement that aimed to return filmmaking to a focus on core values of story, performance, and theme, Breaking the Waves shares many stylistic similarities to later Dogme films, but it is not considered a true Dogme film. One goal of Dogme filmmaking was to better connect with the audience by stripping away the artifice of special effects and slick post-production, and though he doesn’t strictly adhere to the filmmaking tenets laid out in the manifesto in Breaking the Waves, the desired effect of audience engagement and delivery of cinematic truth is achieved through von Trier’s beginning to experiment with a more minimalist and naturalistic style. The film was shot entirely with handheld cameras, with von Trier often framing his leads in extreme close ups. The audience is granted an unusual intimacy to Bess and Jan, with von Trier explicitly and frankly filming them having sex, lying in bed, dancing. The camera engages in a sort of dance, as well, with the freedom of movement provided by handheld allowing von Trier to film his subjects from unusual angles. In post-production, von Trier chose to transfer the images from film to video and back to film again, resulting in a slightly grainy, occasionally out of focus image that is reminiscent of a home movie. Although both of these unusual stylistic choices could be seen as disruptive or distracting, used for their distancing effect on the audience, I think that they enhance my own personal identification with the film and the characters, as well as lending the film a sort of cinéma-vérité quality. Sometimes devout realism can rob a film of some of its emotional impact, but in this case I think it helps to create poignancy.

Of course the real emotional engine of the film is Watson in her performance as Bess. The film requires her to portray the full scope of human emotions, from the joy that Bess experiences when she and Jan are first married to the utter anguish that she feels when she realizes she may have been somehow at fault for his accident. Her performance ranges from performative, histrionic fits of despair to quiet moments of prayer and internal reflection. Despite her devotion to Jan, Watson plays Bess as primarily internally focused, and she incorporates subtleties into the character that hint at her mental illness and her stunted emotional development. There are several scenes that feature Bess praying, and in them she utters her prayers out loud and also vocalizes what she believes to be God’s personal responses to her. Watson’s subtle change of inflection in these scenes, a conversation of one, demonstrate the sadly rich internal world that Bess inhabits, and the extreme religious faith to which she clings. Watson’s Bess is a, literal, wide-eyed innocent, von Trier often framing her face in extreme close up and highlighting her eyes, which seem to be constantly searching. As the film progresses, we see more and more pain enter into those eyes as Bess continues to put herself through emotional and physical punishment. The performance was lauded by critics and Watson earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Astonishingly, Breaking the Waves was her debut feature but she carries the film entirely, imbuing her character with heartbreaking pathos.

Although it is a bleak film, Breaking the Waves isn’t an entirely grim affair. It does have moments of levity and some astonishingly beautiful compositions. The film’s opening scenes at Bess and Jan’s wedding begin the film on a light hearted note. There is music and dancing, and despite the misgivings of Bess’s family and the village Elders, everyone generally seems happy for her. The cultural differences between Jan’s coworkers and the chaste villagers is largely played for laughs, although there is a sinister undertone to an exchange between Jan’s friend, Terry (Jean-Marc Barr), and Bess’s grandfather (Phil McCall), in which the latter smashes a glass with his bare hand in response to the former crushing his beer can in an aggressive manner. Largely, though, the scene sets up what will be a fairly quaint setting for the beginning of the film, before Jan’s accident triggers the film’s darker portions. Von Trier’s film depicts the Scottish countryside as rugged and cold, but beautiful, and the intertitle shots that introduce the seven chapters that he has chosen to break his film up into are stunning, possessing a painterly aesthetic. These intertitles are jarring, made up of landscapes so vibrant they appear to be tinted, the static long shots are soundtracked by 1970s British rock classics, and they stand in stark contrast with the aesthetic of the rest of the film. Their beauty is almost transcendent and its radical departure from the established visual aesthetic of the film indicates that for von Trier, perhaps, there is little place for traditional beauty in the real world of his film. These intertitles could also be seen as a sort of fantasy informed by the influence of Jan on Bess’s life and mental state, as she quickly mentions music as being one of the noteworthy contributions of outsiders like Jan to life in the village when she is being interrogated by the village Elders prior to her wedding. Even when working somewhat within the framework of a restrictive code of filmic ethics such as Dogme filmmaking, von Trier can’t help but include some of the beautiful, set compositions that would become more prevalent in his post-2000 work.

Von Trier also pulls his punches somewhat by including a quasi-happy ending to the film. While I won’t go into depth on the specifics of the film’s ending, because I think that its final shot is a thing of true beauty and needs to be seen to truly be understood, it does offer some absolution and redemption for Bess. Von Trier’s later films would abandon this sentiment, and often find their heroines left in a much more precarious or pessimistic position at film’s end, but I think that Breaking the Waves is a better film for allowing some light to permeate its darkness. Many seem to think that this film is von Trier’s finest work, but I think that I prefer Dancer in the Dark, perhaps just because I saw it so much earlier in life than I saw Breaking the Waves. Watching it this time, though, I was struck by the film in a way that I hadn’t necessarily been in my first two viewings. It’s easy to get caught up in the film’s bleakness, as its long running time compounds the experience of watching Bess’s prolonged suffering, but the moments of true beauty are certainly there in the film. It’s a more complex film than I had previously realized, and it bears many thematic resemblances to one of my favorite films, Au Hasard Balthazar. Just like that film always does, the ending of Breaking the Waves brought me to tears. Experiencing a Lars von Trier film can be an emotionally exhausting experience, and, to be honest, I don’t know that all of his films are worth the amount of trauma that they can inflict upon a viewer, but Breaking the Waves is a piece of high art. It probably isn’t the best introduction to the cinema of von Trier, but it is a film that’s not to be missed.

Drew's DVD Project

12 Monkeys to Zodiac

Arthouse

Holy Motors

Fata Morgana

Dogville

Breaking the Waves