Chinese Version
Breaking the Waves (Denmark/France)
as simple as a thunderstorm
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Director: Lars von Trier
Cast: Emily Watson Stellan Skarsgard
Footage: 159min
Year: 1996
Bess is a naive, borderline simple young woman who lives in a Scottish coastal town ruled by the religious doctrine of its council of elders. She marries an oil rig worker despite a strict community's opposition. The couple enjoys peaceful wedded bliss, with the wordly Jan introducing Bess to the mysteries of sex. But soon Jan is paralyzed from the neck down in a freak accident.
Her belief in her ability to shape Jan's life becomes an obsession after he urges her to take a lover as his surrogate. Bess sees it as an expression of her devotion to Jan that even God won't be able to ignore. Then she gives up family, friends and church as she tries literally to buy his life with a series of increasingly reckless sexual encounters.
This film is one of the most distinctive European movies of the 1990s, marking von Trier's movement toward his influential "Dogma 95" school of filmmaking.
References:
'Breaking the Waves' dives into obsessive mix of devotion, sex, faith
Works of the same director: