Breaking the Waves

Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996) won the Grand Prix at Cannes and the European Film Award for Best Film, and brought the Danish provocateur his first wave of international acclaim. The opening salvo of a loose trilogy he called the "Golden Heart" films, it announced a rawer, more emotional von Trier after the chilly, hyper-stylised work of his early career.

Emily Watson, in an astonishing screen debut, plays Bess, the childlike and intensely devout young Scotswoman whose marriage to an oil-rig worker, and whose simple faith, are pushed to breaking point by an accident at sea. Von Trier shoots in restless, handheld, desaturated images, and divides the film into chapters headed by saturated, almost kitsch landscape tableaux scored to seventies rock — a stripped-back, location-shot style that directly anticipated the Dogme 95 movement he would soon help to found. The effect is at once gritty and strangely transcendent.

Watson's performance earned an Academy Award nomination and launched her career, while the film confirmed von Trier as one of European cinema's most divisive and most discussed figures, accused by turns of cruelty and hailed as a visionary. Harrowing, sincere and formally radical, Breaking the Waves pushes the conventions of melodrama to an almost unbearable extreme — a test of goodness and faith staged with such overwhelming conviction that it is, for many who see it, impossible ever to shake off.