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. It opened a loose trilogy he called the "Golden Heart" films, and 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, each headed by a saturated, almost kitsch landscape tableau scored to seventies rock. That stripped-back, location-shot style anticipated the Dogme 95 movement he would soon help to found, and it makes the film feel gritty and, strangely, transcendent.

Watson's performance earned an Academy Award nomination and launched her career, and the film confirmed von Trier as one of the most divisive and most discussed figures in European cinema, accused of cruelty by some and hailed as a visionary by others. Breaking the Waves pushes the conventions of melodrama to an almost unbearable extreme, and it is harrowing, sincere and formally radical in equal measure. Its test of goodness and faith is staged with such overwhelming conviction that many who see it never manage to shake it off.