In a closed town on the coast of Scotland in the 1970s, people devoutly believed in God, and Bess, who suffered from mental illness, was one of the believers. She falls in love with oil worker Jan and gets married, and loses control when she can't bear the loneliness of Jan going to work and not by her side. She begged God day and night to let Jan come back, but what she waited for was the terrible news that Jan was paralyzed due to a work-related injury. The story is so normal here that it doesn't seem like Lars von Trier's handwriting, and when I start to feel bored, the turning point finally arrives on schedule. The terminally ill Jan asks Bess to have sex with other men and experience pleasure again, in order to stimulate his will to survive. Bess went from incredible to willing, and was eventually banished from the town for his debauchery. Bess goes crazy and dies on a prostitution boat.
The female characters created by Lars Von Trier are a bit anti-rational and anti-logical. The religious ecstasy of Bess, the heroine of "Breaking the Waves", is the strongest, but she believes in love. When love appears, the only remaining rationality of this naive neurotic girl is destroyed. Catholicism and the shackles of the secular world could no longer provide Bess with care and protection, but drove her to a dead end. I thought Lars von Trier was questioning the repression and paranoia of religion, but when I think about it, is Bess not a paranoid about love? She is also the lamb of love, crazy for love and sacrifice for love. The paranoia of confronting another ideology of occupation power with one kind of paranoia can be imagined.
"Why are you so different from others!" "You must learn to live with loneliness!" How men must be, women must be, everyone seems to have a destiny, and only if they follow them completely can they be regarded as not breaking the rules. This is the rule of thumb in this world. People can only choose to follow the crowd or die.
If secular conventions and religions teach Bess to endure, then Bess's heart teaches the word believing. Don't ask anything, just believe. The belief in God was the same, and the belief in love later was the same. Believing without reason and logic is the highest morality in Bess' heart.
"I can believe."
That's what Bess believes - always believe, whether it's love or something else. But is it really possible? Perhaps Bess's love and faith have their own true meaning, but the price Bess paid for this is to be eternally cursed and fall into boundless sinking and destruction. Lars Von Trier's handling is heartbreaking. I can't like Bess's story, probably because love in that world is so high, it's better to be broken than broken.
What I didn't expect was the ending, my sister-in-law Dodo persuaded the priests to let Bess be buried in the church cemetery, and Bess's redemption really brought Jan's miracle. And I find this happy ending to be blunt and ironic. Since love is so difficult and difficult to shape, why create a fantasy bubble to persuade people to believe it. It can only be said that whether it is the small town in the movie or the world we live in, those who believe in love can only be cursed "pagans". Humans are born with sex and born with love, but unfortunately, love has never dominated life. In the primitive era of slash-and-burn farming, physiology was paramount, and love was naturally impossible to talk about; looking back on the history that can be written, love is at most only the embellishment of the long history of civilized society; today, the meaning of modern love is also more obscure and hazy. "Breaking the Waves" points us to an unknown right or wrong answer: love is not perseverance, love is desperate belief.
But dare you?
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