The evening bell strikes above the heaven Sending echoes of the starry sky.The living are still used to wipe away their tears.The dead are gone please return to your heaven.
Watching the ending of Lars von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves”, I suddenly remembered these lines of poetry. There is a difference between the poem’s silence and the poignancy of Ra’s film, but the core of the poem is the same.
Ra’s films are always so shocking, he used to crush goodness and beauty in front of your eyes, and let you experience the orgy of suffering in the midst of extreme depression. From his films, I experienced the spirit of Nietzsche’s god of wine, and understood why he said “tragedy can purify the soul”.
Like Björk’s Thelma, Emily Watson’s Beth is also seemingly unhinged – Ra’s always lets such paranoid people play the ultimate story.
And What’s your talent, then, Bess?I can believe.
Yes, she can believe. She often talks to herself and to the God in her heart, even her expressions are subtle. This should be the result of a long period of spiritual solitude. She does not believe in the god of the masses, nor in her own will; her faith has only one point: love.
Unfortunately, according to the ancient custom, any person who takes love as a faith will end up with a tragic end. Beth is not spared.
The whole movie is divided into eight paragraphs, the structure is somewhat similar to “Dogville”. The music at the beginning is very nice, and the scenes, from the beach house to the winding mountain road, and then to the flowing water, each place has a moral.
Indeed, the wedding scene at the beginning of the film is reminiscent of “The Deer Hunter,” a film in which the initial frenzy becomes a lifelong memory of torture. And Beth’s wedding is not smooth, even a bit panicky. First she was cross-examined by the priest and the squire, her expression so engrossed. Then the groom, Jane, is late. Beth is furious, and for once in the whole film she seems to be furious, and when the helicopter Jane is in lands, she rushes up to it. All her friends advised her not to do so, or she would stain the wedding dress. She doesn’t understand that in Beth’s mind, at this point, she still can’t accept the slightest flaw in love.
“Beth, you have the most generous heart, you always give what you have to others.” This is what the people who had been helped, said about Beth. This on the one hand shows that Beth is a good person in general, in fact, the most important point is that none of those things are important to Beth. She just wanted love, so while everyone else felt stunned by this sudden marriage, Beth thought it was the result of her years of prayer.
The church where they were married had no bells, so no one rang the blessing bell for them. It’s a metaphor with an ulterior motive; everything is predetermined at the beginning.
A little later came the life of two people, as happy as any. When they make love, Beth says “thank you”. When sleeping together, listening to Jane’s thunderous snoring, Beth only sweet smile. When watching the film, this smile is tingling, who knows how abhorrent snoring in your ears when you want to sleep the most.
Jane was an oil worker who had to leave home to go to the construction site. Yet it was that happy memory that tormented Beth after the separation, almost into a mental crisis. Beth calls Jane from a phone booth and dwells on the memories of the sex between the two of them. Beth prays to the God of her heart to bring Jane home.
Jane has an accident at the construction site, is paralyzed and admitted to the hospital in her home town. Time passes and everyone agrees that Beth and Jane’s love has been tested.
Jane tells Beth to go have sex with another man and tell herself about the experience so she can live. Beth at first disagrees and then has a strong intellectual struggle, she really thinks that without this Jane will die. For Jane’s sake and for the sake of her love, she agreed to go to someone else. So she first finds the doctor who likes her, and after drinking at the doctor’s house, she lies naked in bed. However the doctor rejected her. Beth wraps herself in a blanket and sobs uncontrollably.
From Jane’s point of view, he does this for Beth’s sake, but he does not understand that this is precisely the greatest destruction of Beth. Beth began to give up her self-esteem and her original ideas for Jane. She does what Jane says, hoping that this will stir up Jane’s desire to get better. Her personality begins to split and her love is completely cut off from her body, as well as isolating herself completely from worldly society. Eventually Beth’s mother throws her out of the house as well.
Later, after a violent encounter with a sailor, Beth, dressed in a prostitute’s outfit, is chased and humiliated by a group of children. She fainted on the ground. The local decent people come to chase the children away, but will not give her any help, or all her friends come and take Beth to the hospital. A dying Beth visits Jane before her surgery, but Jane, who is also dying, still shows no signs of improvement. Beth died in the hospital. Her friends all prayed for her at Jane’s bedside, hoping that he would live and get up and walk.
The last part was Beth’s funeral, filled with people’s scorn. And Jane actually survived and got up and walked. In the night, he stole Beth’s remains, and he couldn’t let Beth sleep in this humiliated land. The always grim and brooding Ra’s uses a romantic ending here, and the screen goes dark as Beth’s remains are sunk into the sea. This is followed by the sound of bells.
While the sky is clear, the film’s perspective becomes completely overhead, a bell from heaven. As Dudu said to Jane: “She’s sacrificing for you, she doesn’t care about herself anymore.” Beth’s love, too, can only ring with her own life.
This ending dilutes the tragic atmosphere of the film and becomes emotionally palatable. In fact, how could Jane stand up? Even if you take love as faith and give everything for it, who can guarantee that your dreams will come true? The heart of man is unpredictable, not to mention the heart of God.
Breaking the Waves also contains Ra’s questioning of conscience. Like the child in Dogtown, the child in this movie is so shady, and the bullying of the underdog is chilling.
Dudu. Ra’s protagonists are often women, men are so powerless in them, and only women can shine with compassion in times of crisis.
