Breaking the Waves

02/06/2025

Film    Download PDF  

A Conflation of Influences

   What a film does and how a viewer responds might seem an interchangeable question, with a work offering pathos, humour and action, and the viewer responding with tearfulness, laughter and excitement. The film insists on technical manipulation and the viewer reacts with emotion. When writing on a film, should the critic propose that it does something to us, or that we feel something the film does? A movie can work as hard as it likes at making us cry, but that doesn’t mean we will; another film might not appear to be trying to induce tears at all but cry we might. There is no guarantee the techniques adopted will generate the affect expected but many directors will assume their comedy will produce laughter and their weepie produce tears, and this likelihood is contained by the genre they work within. When a horror movie director shows a solitary character walking down a school corridor at night, after sneaking into the building, and a loud noise is provided behind a cupboard door, the director will hope the audience jumps. If they don’t, the film has failed in its generic duty. Viewers want to be startled and want to scream. Equally, a film might not be a horror at all, but a very susceptible viewer nevertheless yells out when a character merely enters the frame unexpectedly. With some viewers it takes a lot to make them jump - and a horror aficionado will be used to most of the tricks and hope the filmmaker will achieve the affect without using the most predictable of methods. Another person who doesn’t know the tropes or is easily frightened needs not even the barest of generic cliches to feel scared.

              Many films have generic expectations, and many a viewer conforms to them, demands them, even. But what of the filmmaker who resists the generic and the viewer who seeks affects that aren’t so readily contained? In such instances, we might speak of the generic loosely, provocatively, all the better to understand how we feel, just as the director might use the same provisional language to explain their intentions. Speaking of Breaking the Waves, set in a strict Presbyterian community on the Isle of Skye, director Lars von Trier talked about in the context of fairy tales and the biblical, discussing a Danish tale he remembered as a child about someone who was good and ends up stripped of everything but her innocence. As von Trier says, at “the end of the book, after she’s passed through the woods, she stands naked and without anything. And the last sentence in the book was: “’I’ll be fine anyway’.” (Sight and Sound) He adds, “I also wanted to do a film with a religious motif, a film about miracles. And at the same time I wanted to do a completely naturalistic film.” (Sight and Sound)

           These wouldn’t usually be compatible demands, and far from generic ones: mixing a fairy tale with a biblical parable, contained by the realistic. The fairy tale is often best approached through animation and often is, with Disney’s early reputation based on adapting Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty. The miraculous can take the form of Hollywood epics like The Ten Commandments or Samson and Delilah, or the spiritually grave — The Sacrifice and Ordet. Realism often focuses on the lives of the poor who lack agency in a world controlled by others, exemplified by Bicycle Thieves and Kes. 

        Yet the realism von Trier seeks is chiefly in the form; the miraculous he demands comes through the absurd, and the fairy tale elements he adopts are far from those for children. It is as though von Trier wished to draw on the extreme edges of the tale, the miraculous and the realistic all the better to explore what the film wishes to do and how ambiguously the viewer will respond. “Breaking the Waves is a film where a lot of things happened by accident” the director says (Trier on von Trier), suggesting that he didn’t only want to throw together ostensibly irreconcilable filmic traditions, but also hoped a few contingencies would throw things further into disarray. It has always been a useless myth that everything a filmmaker does is intentional since the complexity of production mitigates against perfectionism. Sometimes the accidental turns out to be more appropriate than the deliberate, the specifics of performance more important than mise en scene. Von Trier echoes Martin Scorsese’s and Arthur Penn’s editors when he says there were aspects of mise en scene that just didn’t make it into the frame because of other priorities: “The important thing was what was happening with the actors in the scene.” (Trier on Von Trier) Penn's eidtor Dedee Allen would say: “go to the theatre - got to Broadway,- go to off-Broadway, because understanding and appreciating performance is the most crucial lesson for editors.” (Sight and Sound) Thelma Schoonmaker always reckoned "people worry too much about continuity these days. The Red Shoes is filled with continuity errors. Who cares? Because you’re completely involved in the momentum of it.” (Girls on Tops)

      Yet in Breaking the Waves this is more than the contingent and the on-set experimental, more than accepting what makes it within the frame and what doesn’t, and how to bring out the best in a performance when your second choice becomes even better than your first choice: von Trier originally considered Gerard Depardieu for the role of the central character's husband, Jan (Played by Stellan Skarsgard.) It is also about creating a new feeling by amalgamating elements that wouldn’t usually be expected to go together. If the horror’s intention is usually met by the scream, the weepie by the lachrymose response, and the comedy by laughter, what happens if all three responses are invoked by a film that nobody going into it can anticipate these would be the emotions and reactions elicited? The gap between what the film does and how the viewer responds becomes complicated and the generic collapses under the weight of the provocative, easily summarised in the film's plot. Here we have a young woman of great if idiosyncratic faith, who marries a man from outside the community working works on oil rigs. She prays for him to come home and he does so after an accident. She believes her prayer created it and believes she can save his life by destroying herself, doing so initially by sleeping around to offer the sexual fantasies Jan seeks, and then suicidally taking a second trip out to a trawler boat with murderous sailors on board. 

      Bess is defined inaccurately but juridically as neurotic and psychotic, but the doctor who has made these claims says during the court hearing after her death that a better description would be that she was good. Von Trier's purpose has been to show why medical terms are of little use in the face of the otherworldly. When, during an earlier exchange between Bess and the doctor, he asks what her special gift happens to be, she says belief and the film explores in the most bizarre way why she is right. 

         Von Trier could have hedged his bets and left the viewer ambivalently aware that Bess has contributed to Jan’s steady return to health, or that this is a coincidence and Bess’s beliefs were subjective and weren't necessary to Jan’s recovery. Other great films of faith have done this, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice can leave us wondering whether the central character's willingness to set fire to his home has saved the world from nuclear annihilation, or whether war would have been averted without any need for his house to burn. The film’s title and Tarkovsky’s spiritual concerns might lead us to assume that the ‘proper’ reading is that it was a purposeful sacrifice. But in von Trier’s film, the ending is unequivocal. Jan and his colleagues look up from the rig he is now back working on and see two huge bells in the sky while the sonar system cannot detect Bess’s body they have buried at sea. It is a miraculous conclusion, one pertinent to the film’s beginning, where the minister speaks about the church having no bells. Bess has transcended the church with its petty-minded claims and achieves celestial significance in the clouds. Not all critics were willing to buy it, with Kenneth Turan, for example, saying “Breaking the Waves stands revealed at its conclusion as trite and even juvenile.” (Los Angeles Times) 

        Often, when a film is ambiguously enough presented to offer different readings, it allows a gap to form between what might be the filmmaker’s intentions and what might be the viewer’s interpretation. When a woman disappears in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura and is never found, the viewer can decide for themselves whether she was murdered, took her life or has continued her existence elsewhere. Even if Antonioni were to claim she believed she died by her own hand, since this is missing from the film, his take on it is no more valid than someone who says she was killed. Sure, some evidence for one claim or the other might be cobbled together, but the counter-evidence would probably be equally valid. The nature of the disappearance will remain moot. Yet von Trier seems to want a different type of ambiguity based more on outrage than puzzlement, irritation more than ambivalence. If the director asked only that the viewer were to read the film as they wish, this could have been viewed as a dereliction of directorial responsibility, but not as irresponsibly silly and directorially hyperbolic. Many a genre film is over the top and unequivocal in its meaning; however, this is a consequence of its generic component, not its auteurist overreach. When an action film offers an extended shootout, or a romantic comedy ladles on the syrup as the man rushes to declare his love for the woman he has all but let go, its predictability or its cumbersomeness is contained by playing on and turning up to eleven the genre's demands. Von Trier asks for the same insistence but without the generic scaffolding, and demands a yet greater gap tha nmany an ambiguous film by instead of asking the viewer what to make of it interpretively, insists its meaning will leave audiences divided between accepting this unusual amalgam of melodrama and godliness, and seeing in it the crudest stereotyping of conventional religion, and the most overblown of conclusions, as Bess sacrifices herself so that Jan can take up his bed and walk. 

      In a fine piece on the film, Stephen Heath invokes not surprisingly von Trie’s fellow Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, and discusses 'teleological suspension of the ethical': a recognition of a higher authority or purpose in relation to which the ethical life of the community's norms, the universal public law, becomes merely relative.” (Literature and Theology) However, von Trier so overstates his case in both directions (in making the locals unequivocally bigoted and making the miracle undeniable), that it isn’t only that we have to accept the miraculous; he also asks us to buy into the melodramatic broadness of its presentation. Whether it is the Elders saying at graveside that Bess will burn in hell as they bury what they think is her body (Jan and his friends have taken it and filled the coffin with sand), or all the local kids stoning Bess and calling her a tart, von Trier has no interest in nuance. To expect him to offer it would be to miss the point of a film that wishes to weld together the spiritual cinema of his compatriot Carl Dreyer, Tarkovsky and Robert Bresson, allied to the sort of melodrama Douglas Sirk practised as he showed the individual at odds with the community (especially All that Heaven Allows), and then allies them with a style both realist and formally deliberate. Robby Muller’s camerawork is often hand-held and Anders Refn’s editing indifferent to establishing a scene when it can cut into it and promptly leave it. Yet in contrast to this immediacy of style, it offers the most distancing of devices: a series of chapter headings that punctuate the film with key songs of the era — by David Bowie, Deep Purple, Leonard Cohen, Procul Harum and others — with artificially enhanced images of various locales in and around Skye. 

              Von Trier’s purpose is to draw upon conflicting genres and styles, all the better to produce in the viewer a belief that is a manifold suspension and release. Suspension of disbelief was Coleridge’s term to describe how one is willing to accept unreal worlds that can nevertheless generate actual feelings, and seems closely akin to Aristotle’s catharsis as generally perceived: as an emotional release. But others have used it to refer to the unrealistic: “The term refers to the willingness of an audience to overlook the fantastical parts of a narrative," Jason Hellerman says, "allowing themselves to be fully immersed in the story.” (No Film School) Von Trier wants it to be both conventionally cathartic and hopelessly unrealistic but, instead of undermining disbelief, it potentially duplicates it, creating in the viewer a complicated feeling that doesn’t just accept miracles (many a biblical epic does that), nor only cliches (many a melodrama shows evidence of this). Nor does it simply absorb the complex form of belief found in spiritually inclined films - the sort of form Susan Sontag insisted upon when saying, when speaking of Bresson’s work, “great reflective art is not frigid. It can exalt the spectator, it can present images that appall, it can make him weep. But its emotional power is mediated. The pull towards emotional involvement is counterbalanced by elements in the work that promote distance, disinterestedness, impartiality.”  (Against Interpretation) Von Trier may well be making a film in the Bressonian tradition of spiritual choice,if we accept that both Kierkegaard and Bresson are preoccupied by choosing and this is what so fascinates Von Trier here. Yet he demands that it coexists with the explicitness of a miracle usually found in conventional biblical epics, and asks us to acknowledge the stereotypical and the rushed drama of the melodramatic. If, Von Trier might say, we are moved by Jan’s accident, by Bess’s sacrifice, by Bess’s death, by Jan’s resurrection and, finally by those bells, then he has worked a sort of aesthetic miracle of his own. 

      This is potentially a greater spectatorial achievement than distanciation, with the viewer made critically aware of the conventions often adopted as one becomes conscious of the emotional usually elicited and resists too easy an identification with the material. It is perhaps greater too than the post-modern variation of distanciation, which allows for the cliches and tropes but where one is wise to them, yet simultaneously mocking and moved, disbelieving and incredulous.. There are clearly aspects of both distanciation and the post-modern in Breaking the Waves, but anybody watching it who sees an aloof critique of religion, or a pastiche of melodrama, wouldn’t quite be recognising von Trier’s distinctiveness. The director has mangled to pass through the modernism of Bertolt Brecht and the post-modernism of Fredric Jameson, if we accept the latter’s definition of post-modern art as “a kind of art that wished to escape from the high seriousness of modernism, in favor of the entertaining and the relaxing and so on.” (Social Text) Breaking the Waves is unequivocally not entertaining as works by mid-nineties post-modernists happen to be (Tarantino; the Coens; Almodovar) and very far from relaxing. “Here I didn’t want to distance myself from the strong emotions that the story and its characters contain” (Sight and Sound). But how close or how far from emotion the viewer will be, how readily they accept or reject the miracle that concludes the film, will depend on individual viewers over generic, homogenised audiences. One needn’t see this as a rejection of genre; more a recognition that film is both capable of being a wonderful art of mass entertainment, and also an idiosyncratic medium that can ask for the most idiosyncratic of responses, can even ask for such a response by using some of the aspects which make it a mass entertainment.

       

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Breaking the Waves

A Conflation of Influences

   What a film does and how a viewer responds might seem an interchangeable question, with a work offering pathos, humour and action, and the viewer responding with tearfulness, laughter and excitement. The film insists on technical manipulation and the viewer reacts with emotion. When writing on a film, should the critic propose that it does something to us, or that we feel something the film does? A movie can work as hard as it likes at making us cry, but that doesn’t mean we will; another film might not appear to be trying to induce tears at all but cry we might. There is no guarantee the techniques adopted will generate the affect expected but many directors will assume their comedy will produce laughter and their weepie produce tears, and this likelihood is contained by the genre they work within. When a horror movie director shows a solitary character walking down a school corridor at night, after sneaking into the building, and a loud noise is provided behind a cupboard door, the director will hope the audience jumps. If they don’t, the film has failed in its generic duty. Viewers want to be startled and want to scream. Equally, a film might not be a horror at all, but a very susceptible viewer nevertheless yells out when a character merely enters the frame unexpectedly. With some viewers it takes a lot to make them jump - and a horror aficionado will be used to most of the tricks and hope the filmmaker will achieve the affect without using the most predictable of methods. Another person who doesn’t know the tropes or is easily frightened needs not even the barest of generic cliches to feel scared.

              Many films have generic expectations, and many a viewer conforms to them, demands them, even. But what of the filmmaker who resists the generic and the viewer who seeks affects that aren’t so readily contained? In such instances, we might speak of the generic loosely, provocatively, all the better to understand how we feel, just as the director might use the same provisional language to explain their intentions. Speaking of Breaking the Waves, set in a strict Presbyterian community on the Isle of Skye, director Lars von Trier talked about in the context of fairy tales and the biblical, discussing a Danish tale he remembered as a child about someone who was good and ends up stripped of everything but her innocence. As von Trier says, at “the end of the book, after she’s passed through the woods, she stands naked and without anything. And the last sentence in the book was: “’I’ll be fine anyway’.” (Sight and Sound) He adds, “I also wanted to do a film with a religious motif, a film about miracles. And at the same time I wanted to do a completely naturalistic film.” (Sight and Sound)

           These wouldn’t usually be compatible demands, and far from generic ones: mixing a fairy tale with a biblical parable, contained by the realistic. The fairy tale is often best approached through animation and often is, with Disney’s early reputation based on adapting Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty. The miraculous can take the form of Hollywood epics like The Ten Commandments or Samson and Delilah, or the spiritually grave — The Sacrifice and Ordet. Realism often focuses on the lives of the poor who lack agency in a world controlled by others, exemplified by Bicycle Thieves and Kes. 

        Yet the realism von Trier seeks is chiefly in the form; the miraculous he demands comes through the absurd, and the fairy tale elements he adopts are far from those for children. It is as though von Trier wished to draw on the extreme edges of the tale, the miraculous and the realistic all the better to explore what the film wishes to do and how ambiguously the viewer will respond. “Breaking the Waves is a film where a lot of things happened by accident” the director says (Trier on von Trier), suggesting that he didn’t only want to throw together ostensibly irreconcilable filmic traditions, but also hoped a few contingencies would throw things further into disarray. It has always been a useless myth that everything a filmmaker does is intentional since the complexity of production mitigates against perfectionism. Sometimes the accidental turns out to be more appropriate than the deliberate, the specifics of performance more important than mise en scene. Von Trier echoes Martin Scorsese’s and Arthur Penn’s editors when he says there were aspects of mise en scene that just didn’t make it into the frame because of other priorities: “The important thing was what was happening with the actors in the scene.” (Trier on Von Trier) Penn's eidtor Dedee Allen would say: “go to the theatre - got to Broadway,- go to off-Broadway, because understanding and appreciating performance is the most crucial lesson for editors.” (Sight and Sound) Thelma Schoonmaker always reckoned "people worry too much about continuity these days. The Red Shoes is filled with continuity errors. Who cares? Because you’re completely involved in the momentum of it.” (Girls on Tops)

      Yet in Breaking the Waves this is more than the contingent and the on-set experimental, more than accepting what makes it within the frame and what doesn’t, and how to bring out the best in a performance when your second choice becomes even better than your first choice: von Trier originally considered Gerard Depardieu for the role of the central character's husband, Jan (Played by Stellan Skarsgard.) It is also about creating a new feeling by amalgamating elements that wouldn’t usually be expected to go together. If the horror’s intention is usually met by the scream, the weepie by the lachrymose response, and the comedy by laughter, what happens if all three responses are invoked by a film that nobody going into it can anticipate these would be the emotions and reactions elicited? The gap between what the film does and how the viewer responds becomes complicated and the generic collapses under the weight of the provocative, easily summarised in the film's plot. Here we have a young woman of great if idiosyncratic faith, who marries a man from outside the community working works on oil rigs. She prays for him to come home and he does so after an accident. She believes her prayer created it and believes she can save his life by destroying herself, doing so initially by sleeping around to offer the sexual fantasies Jan seeks, and then suicidally taking a second trip out to a trawler boat with murderous sailors on board. 

      Bess is defined inaccurately but juridically as neurotic and psychotic, but the doctor who has made these claims says during the court hearing after her death that a better description would be that she was good. Von Trier's purpose has been to show why medical terms are of little use in the face of the otherworldly. When, during an earlier exchange between Bess and the doctor, he asks what her special gift happens to be, she says belief and the film explores in the most bizarre way why she is right. 

         Von Trier could have hedged his bets and left the viewer ambivalently aware that Bess has contributed to Jan’s steady return to health, or that this is a coincidence and Bess’s beliefs were subjective and weren't necessary to Jan’s recovery. Other great films of faith have done this, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice can leave us wondering whether the central character's willingness to set fire to his home has saved the world from nuclear annihilation, or whether war would have been averted without any need for his house to burn. The film’s title and Tarkovsky’s spiritual concerns might lead us to assume that the ‘proper’ reading is that it was a purposeful sacrifice. But in von Trier’s film, the ending is unequivocal. Jan and his colleagues look up from the rig he is now back working on and see two huge bells in the sky while the sonar system cannot detect Bess’s body they have buried at sea. It is a miraculous conclusion, one pertinent to the film’s beginning, where the minister speaks about the church having no bells. Bess has transcended the church with its petty-minded claims and achieves celestial significance in the clouds. Not all critics were willing to buy it, with Kenneth Turan, for example, saying “Breaking the Waves stands revealed at its conclusion as trite and even juvenile.” (Los Angeles Times) 

        Often, when a film is ambiguously enough presented to offer different readings, it allows a gap to form between what might be the filmmaker’s intentions and what might be the viewer’s interpretation. When a woman disappears in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura and is never found, the viewer can decide for themselves whether she was murdered, took her life or has continued her existence elsewhere. Even if Antonioni were to claim she believed she died by her own hand, since this is missing from the film, his take on it is no more valid than someone who says she was killed. Sure, some evidence for one claim or the other might be cobbled together, but the counter-evidence would probably be equally valid. The nature of the disappearance will remain moot. Yet von Trier seems to want a different type of ambiguity based more on outrage than puzzlement, irritation more than ambivalence. If the director asked only that the viewer were to read the film as they wish, this could have been viewed as a dereliction of directorial responsibility, but not as irresponsibly silly and directorially hyperbolic. Many a genre film is over the top and unequivocal in its meaning; however, this is a consequence of its generic component, not its auteurist overreach. When an action film offers an extended shootout, or a romantic comedy ladles on the syrup as the man rushes to declare his love for the woman he has all but let go, its predictability or its cumbersomeness is contained by playing on and turning up to eleven the genre's demands. Von Trier asks for the same insistence but without the generic scaffolding, and demands a yet greater gap tha nmany an ambiguous film by instead of asking the viewer what to make of it interpretively, insists its meaning will leave audiences divided between accepting this unusual amalgam of melodrama and godliness, and seeing in it the crudest stereotyping of conventional religion, and the most overblown of conclusions, as Bess sacrifices herself so that Jan can take up his bed and walk. 

      In a fine piece on the film, Stephen Heath invokes not surprisingly von Trie’s fellow Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, and discusses 'teleological suspension of the ethical': a recognition of a higher authority or purpose in relation to which the ethical life of the community's norms, the universal public law, becomes merely relative.” (Literature and Theology) However, von Trier so overstates his case in both directions (in making the locals unequivocally bigoted and making the miracle undeniable), that it isn’t only that we have to accept the miraculous; he also asks us to buy into the melodramatic broadness of its presentation. Whether it is the Elders saying at graveside that Bess will burn in hell as they bury what they think is her body (Jan and his friends have taken it and filled the coffin with sand), or all the local kids stoning Bess and calling her a tart, von Trier has no interest in nuance. To expect him to offer it would be to miss the point of a film that wishes to weld together the spiritual cinema of his compatriot Carl Dreyer, Tarkovsky and Robert Bresson, allied to the sort of melodrama Douglas Sirk practised as he showed the individual at odds with the community (especially All that Heaven Allows), and then allies them with a style both realist and formally deliberate. Robby Muller’s camerawork is often hand-held and Anders Refn’s editing indifferent to establishing a scene when it can cut into it and promptly leave it. Yet in contrast to this immediacy of style, it offers the most distancing of devices: a series of chapter headings that punctuate the film with key songs of the era — by David Bowie, Deep Purple, Leonard Cohen, Procul Harum and others — with artificially enhanced images of various locales in and around Skye. 

              Von Trier’s purpose is to draw upon conflicting genres and styles, all the better to produce in the viewer a belief that is a manifold suspension and release. Suspension of disbelief was Coleridge’s term to describe how one is willing to accept unreal worlds that can nevertheless generate actual feelings, and seems closely akin to Aristotle’s catharsis as generally perceived: as an emotional release. But others have used it to refer to the unrealistic: “The term refers to the willingness of an audience to overlook the fantastical parts of a narrative," Jason Hellerman says, "allowing themselves to be fully immersed in the story.” (No Film School) Von Trier wants it to be both conventionally cathartic and hopelessly unrealistic but, instead of undermining disbelief, it potentially duplicates it, creating in the viewer a complicated feeling that doesn’t just accept miracles (many a biblical epic does that), nor only cliches (many a melodrama shows evidence of this). Nor does it simply absorb the complex form of belief found in spiritually inclined films - the sort of form Susan Sontag insisted upon when saying, when speaking of Bresson’s work, “great reflective art is not frigid. It can exalt the spectator, it can present images that appall, it can make him weep. But its emotional power is mediated. The pull towards emotional involvement is counterbalanced by elements in the work that promote distance, disinterestedness, impartiality.”  (Against Interpretation) Von Trier may well be making a film in the Bressonian tradition of spiritual choice,if we accept that both Kierkegaard and Bresson are preoccupied by choosing and this is what so fascinates Von Trier here. Yet he demands that it coexists with the explicitness of a miracle usually found in conventional biblical epics, and asks us to acknowledge the stereotypical and the rushed drama of the melodramatic. If, Von Trier might say, we are moved by Jan’s accident, by Bess’s sacrifice, by Bess’s death, by Jan’s resurrection and, finally by those bells, then he has worked a sort of aesthetic miracle of his own. 

      This is potentially a greater spectatorial achievement than distanciation, with the viewer made critically aware of the conventions often adopted as one becomes conscious of the emotional usually elicited and resists too easy an identification with the material. It is perhaps greater too than the post-modern variation of distanciation, which allows for the cliches and tropes but where one is wise to them, yet simultaneously mocking and moved, disbelieving and incredulous.. There are clearly aspects of both distanciation and the post-modern in Breaking the Waves, but anybody watching it who sees an aloof critique of religion, or a pastiche of melodrama, wouldn’t quite be recognising von Trier’s distinctiveness. The director has mangled to pass through the modernism of Bertolt Brecht and the post-modernism of Fredric Jameson, if we accept the latter’s definition of post-modern art as “a kind of art that wished to escape from the high seriousness of modernism, in favor of the entertaining and the relaxing and so on.” (Social Text) Breaking the Waves is unequivocally not entertaining as works by mid-nineties post-modernists happen to be (Tarantino; the Coens; Almodovar) and very far from relaxing. “Here I didn’t want to distance myself from the strong emotions that the story and its characters contain” (Sight and Sound). But how close or how far from emotion the viewer will be, how readily they accept or reject the miracle that concludes the film, will depend on individual viewers over generic, homogenised audiences. One needn’t see this as a rejection of genre; more a recognition that film is both capable of being a wonderful art of mass entertainment, and also an idiosyncratic medium that can ask for the most idiosyncratic of responses, can even ask for such a response by using some of the aspects which make it a mass entertainment.

       


© Tony McKibbin