The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Lars von Trier · a film · 1996 · about 158 minutes · written by Lars von Trier, with Peter Asmussen on the dialogue · in English
Mode
Melodrama of faith and sacrifice in the shape of a saint’s life; hagiography, fairy tale and the chamber drama of a marriage in one
Mythos
The holy fool taken for mad; the Magdalene and the sacrificial lamb in one figure; the girl with the golden heart who gives away everything; a miracle that comes too late to save
Phase
From a wedding to a burial, in numbered chapters between a prologue and an epilogue, in a village on the coast and on a rig at sea in the early 1970s
Presentation
Feature film in widescreen, about 158 minutes, in English; the camera almost wholly handheld, the colour drained, no original score; each chapter opened by a still, digitally worked landscape by Per Kirkeby held under a rock song of the period
Register
From wedding comedy and a bride’s joy, looked straight into the lens, to sexual degradation, stoning and death, and at the close a miracle
Scale
One marriage, one village and its church, one body, and the sea
Governing Proposition
A young woman in a strict Presbyterian village on the Scottish coast marries a man who works on an oil rig, prays for his return, and takes the accident that cripples him as God’s answer; at his request she gives herself to other men, believing each act the price of his life, until the community that taught her that God speaks and requires casts her out and she goes to her death. The wager of the film is that a goodness entire enough to look like madness cannot be recognised by the religion that claims to keep goodness, and that a camera bound to bodies and weather can still end on a sign from heaven.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens on a marriage. Bess McNeill, played by Emily Watson in her first role for the screen, is a young woman of a strict Presbyterian community on the north-west coast of Scotland, in the early 1970s. She marries Jan Nyman, played by Stellan Skarsgård, a man who works on an oil rig offshore. The wedding is comic and rough: a band, the grandfather drunk, Jan’s friends at the tables. Bess is happier than anyone has seen her, and she turns her joy straight into the camera, as if the audience were a guest she wanted to share it with.
Around her the community is drawn plainly. Its elders govern, judge and bury, and they do not let women speak in church. Its church has no music: the only music in the film is what people play or hear, the wedding band, Bess’s radio, and singing the church refuses. Bess’s mother, played by Sandra Voe, obeys the elders. Dodo, played by Katrin Cartlidge, is the widow of Bess’s dead brother, and stands beside Bess as her friend, her reason and her warmth. Into this order Bess brings a husband from the rig and a happiness of the body that the order has no words for.
Lars von Trier directed the film and wrote it, with Peter Asmussen credited for collaboration on the dialogue, for Zentropa Entertainments in Denmark with a wide European co-production behind it. Robby Müller photographed it, Anders Refn cut it and Karl Júlíusson designed it. It was shown in competition at Cannes in May 1996, where it won the Grand Prix, and released that year, running about 158 minutes in English. Watson was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. It was the first of the films von Trier called his Golden Heart films, before The Idiots (1998) and Dancer in the Dark (2000).
Movement II
Bess talks to God. Alone in the empty church she prays aloud, and then answers herself in his voice, stern and lowered, her own face speaking both parts. It is the film’s whole theology in one actor’s two registers: a God who speaks, as the elders have taught, and who requires. Whether the second voice is madness, conscience or God the film will not say.
The married days pass in the house and in bed, and then Jan goes back to the rig. His calls come to the telephone on the wall of the community hall, and when the rig calls Bess meets it with a terror equal to her joy. She cannot bear his absence, and she prays for his return. The prayer is the first link of the chain: what Bess asks of God, the film will give her, in a form she will believe she chose.
Between the chapters the film stops. Each opens on a still landscape, coloured and digitally worked, made by the painter Per Kirkeby and held under a rock song of the early 1970s. These tableaux are the only composed images in the film. Everywhere else Müller’s camera is held in the hand, close and unsteady, in widescreen, and Refn cuts across the axis, so the eye is never settled; the colour has been drained after shooting. The handheld world is one of bodies, rooms and weather, in which God is not visible. The tableaux stand outside the story, and are the only places where another order shows.
Movement III
The prayer is answered. An accident on the rig sends Jan home paralysed, to a hospital bed, and Bess believes she caused it: she asked for him back, and he has come back. Dr Richardson, played by Adrian Rawlins, attends to him, and reads Bess as the medicine of the time would read her. Dodo watches over both of them.
From the bed, half in delirium, Jan asks Bess to take lovers and to come back and tell him. The request is the film’s hardest disclosure. His love is real, and Skarsgård plays it as real, and the request is monstrous: a lover’s need turning the beloved into an instrument. In Bess’s logic it becomes something else, the price of his life. If she does what he asks, he will live. Love that consents to anything can be used, and the film does not hide who uses it.
The first encounter is on a bus, with a stranger, and she returns to Jan with her account. The doctor offers another reading of her, and Dodo another, and the film gives both their full weight. It also gives Bess the one thing they cannot: the film is held to her face, and her face does not doubt.
Movement IV
Each encounter is worse than the last, and the community closes its doors in proportion. She confesses in the church, and the elders judge her; door after door is closed to her. The community that condemns Bess is the one that taught her that God speaks and requires. It has made itself the custodian of goodness, and cannot recognise goodness when it comes entire.
In the street the children stone her. It is one of the film’s dreadful summits, and it is given without comment: a woman walking through her own village while children throw stones at her, and no door opening. The doctor and Dodo give the case against what she is doing, plainly and with care, and the film lets them be right about the harm. What it will not let them settle is the meaning.
Bess goes back to the ship, where the sailors wait, Udo Kier among them, staged as melodrama’s villains. She goes because her logic requires it: this is the sacrifice it has asked of her since the first prayer. The walk to the ship is filmed with the same unsteady camera as the wedding. Nothing in the image tells her, or the audience, that she is right.
Movement V
Bess comes back from the ship to die. At the inquest the doctor gives his account of her, and the clinical reason that diagnosed her is made to answer for what it saw. The village buries her with a verdict at the grave, the elders consigning her to their earth. Her body is given to the sea instead: a burial that refuses the elders’ ground.
Then the film breaks its own law. Over the rig at sea, from a sky seen from above, bells sound in the open air. The handheld world of bodies and medicine, where the doctor’s diagnosis was always available, admits a second order, and the miracle comes too late to save and only to vindicate. It is the inheritance of Dreyer’s Ordet, where a simple person’s faith raises the dead, turned toward a death that faith did not prevent. Prepared from the first prayer, it is the plainest instance of the film’s law that what Bess believes acts in the world; it is also an effect some viewers cannot cross.
Thirty years on the argument has not closed. Whether the film sanctifies the sacrifice of a woman’s body or indicts the order that demanded it, whether its theology is sincere, ironic or a provocation, whether the bells endorse Bess’s faith or only the film’s, are still argued, and the film is built so that they must be. The answer it gives is in the form: a camera bound to the body for two and a half hours, and at the end, once, a sound from outside the body’s world. Martyrdom or abuse, the film shows both and chooses neither, and the bells ring over the choice.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is strict, and the subtractive test finds each step of the descent caused by the step before. Bess prays for Jan’s return and is answered by his accident, which she believes she caused; his request that she take lovers and tell him becomes, in her logic, the price of his life; each encounter is worse than the last, and the community closes its doors in proportion; the last trip to the ship is the sacrifice her logic has required from the start. Remove the hospital, the confession in the church or the first encounter on the bus and the chain breaks. What gives is length: the wedding and the first married days run long on texture already established, Terry and the rig crew are present more than they are needed, and the inquest is reached by a slack passage.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a goodness entire enough to be indistinguishable from madness cannot be recognised by a religion that has made itself the custodian of goodness, and the community that condemns Bess is the one that taught her that God speaks and requires. A harder truth stands beside it: love that consents to anything can be used, and Jan’s request, made half in delirium, shows a lover’s need turning the beloved into an instrument. The film discloses too the policing of a woman’s body by elders who will not let women speak in church, and a clinical reason that cannot see her either. Held a tenth below the gate because the film will not settle its own truth: sanctity or abuse is left open by design, and the bells tilt toward vindication in a way that half withdraws the social disclosure.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of two kinds. The first is in Emily Watson’s face: Bess praying alone in the church and answering herself in God’s stern voice, her own lowered; her joy at the wedding and in bed, looking into the camera; her terror at the telephone when the rig calls. The second is in the tableaux, still landscapes under the songs, which lift each chapter out of the handheld world into something like an icon. The dreadful summits gather in the second half: the children stoning her, the walk to the ship, the dying. The last shot, the bells above the rig, is a single great transport whatever one makes of it. Held below the top because the middle chapters, in the hospital and the house, run level for long stretches, and the climax is contested as much as felt.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The myth is built, not cited. The structure is hagiography: the holy fool, simple and taken for mad, whose surrender of the body in love becomes martyrdom and is answered by a sign from heaven. Bess carries the Magdalene and the sacrificial lamb in one figure, and the source von Trier names, the Danish children’s book of the girl with the golden heart who gave away everything, gives the plot the shape of a fairy tale in which goodness is consumed. Under both runs Dreyer’s Ordet (1955), its resurrection by a simple person’s faith turned here to a miracle that comes too late to save and only vindicates. The chapters are stations, the community a chorus of Pharisees. Held below the top because Dreyer and the passion are visible as models, and the myth is sometimes pressed rather than found.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is double: the European cinema of transcendence, Dreyer above all and Bresson’s suffering women, Mouchette (1967) among them; and von Trier’s own cold, composed, image-led manner in The Element of Crime (1984) and Europa (1991). The turn is against both. Against his own name, he gave up the composed image for a handheld camera that follows the actors and breaks continuity, and gave the film to a performance. Against the tradition, he played its austerity as melodrama, with sexual degradation at its centre and a literal miracle at its end. The stake was high: an English-language film of over two and a half hours, an unknown in the lead, ridicule risked at both extremes. Held below the top because the handheld manner was already in television and in his own The Kingdom (1994).
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is the relation of the immanent to the transcendent. The handheld camera, close and unsteady, binds the film to bodies, rooms and weather, and makes a world in which God is not visible. The tableaux, still, coloured and scored, are the only places where another order shows, and they stand outside the story. The chapters give the shape of a book of hours or a saint’s life. The bells bring the second order into the first, and the form is completed by that breach. In the composed manner of Europa Bess’s faith would become a stylised figure; in plain realism the miracle could not happen. Held below the top because the handheld grammar is slack in places, used as texture where it does no work, and the songs are partly decoration.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Thirty years of evidence, and the questions have stayed open and argued: whether the film sanctifies or indicts the sacrifice of a woman’s body; whether its theology is sincere, ironic or a provocation; whether the bells endorse Bess’s faith or only the film’s own; whether Jan’s request is love, illness or exploitation; whether the voice of God she speaks is madness, conscience or God. The feminist argument against the film began at its release and has not closed, and it is read against Dreyer, against von Trier’s later work and within the Golden Heart films as a cycle. On return its doubled pairs reward attention: the elders’ earth and the sea, the church that silences and the bells that sound. Held at the figure because the argument circles one question, martyrdom or abuse, more than it multiplies, and much of the later writing is on the director rather than the film.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Released in 1996, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is strong: the film showed that the handheld, actor-led, unpolished image could carry a spiritual melodrama of the largest scale, that the cinema of transcendence could be made in the grammar of television drama, and that raw style could serve the sublime as well as realism. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stands just before the Dogme 95 films and is commonly placed in their line, The Celebration (1998) and The Idiots (1998) among them; it opened the Golden Heart films and von Trier’s later cinema of suffering women; it set a pattern for handheld European art cinema through the next decade; and it made Emily Watson’s career. The reach is largely within art cinema, and part of it belongs to the Dogme manifesto, signed in 1995.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across thirty years. The film as released survives whole, in one version, and its restorations repair only. Presence has been continuous: repertory and festival revivals, television, home video in successive formats, a place in the study of von Trier and in the teaching of European cinema, and a steady critical standing. It is the presence of a celebrated art film, not of the widest kind, and the director’s later controversies have coloured some reception without taking the film from view. The surface is partly fixed to its making: the drained colour and the processed grain read now as a look of the mid-1990s as much as a choice. The songs belong to the film’s period and do not date it. Thirty years of survival carry the figure; the narrower presence and the processed surface hold it there.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Command of the medium, read to the same anchors as every desk, and the making bears weight in its central departments. Watson’s performance carries the film: a body and face that hold joy, terror and faith with no protection, and look into the lens. Katrin Cartlidge’s Dodo is the film’s reason and its warmth; Stellan Skarsgård’s Jan a man whose love is real and whose request is monstrous. Robby Müller’s camera follows without composing and finds light in wet rooms; Anders Refn’s cutting across the axis keeps the viewer off balance. The charges fall on real shares: the handheld is loose where it does no work and the jump cuts harden into a manner; the drained image muddies whole scenes; the sailors are melodrama’s villains, Udo Kier’s a sketch; the doctor is underwritten; and the bells are an effect some viewers cannot cross.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the wedding party, comic and rough, with the grandfather’s drunkenness and Jan’s friends, and the bells sounding over the rig. Do they obey one law? The film’s law is that what Bess believes acts in the world. On that reading the bells answer the question the whole film has put, and the miracle is the law’s last and plainest instance, prepared by the prayer that seemed to bring Jan home and the accident that seemed to answer her. Against it stands the film’s other law, the handheld world of bodies and medicine, where the doctor’s diagnosis is always available; the ending breaks it, and the film has not quite made the two one physics. The range, from wedding comedy through sexual violence to a miracle, is wide and largely held. Which reading of the bells prevails decides the axis.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Several orders are held in one structure. The sacred: faith, church and miracle. The community as state, its elders governing, judging and burying. The family: the mother who obeys, the dead brother, Dodo his widow, the grandfather. Labour: the rig and the men who leave for it. The body: sex, paralysis and violence. Medicine and reason, in the doctor. The natural order: the sea, the weather, the bare coast. The plot integrates them, for Jan’s accident, the doctor’s reason and the church’s judgment are one crisis. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the routing: everything passes through Bess’s consciousness and her marriage; history and the wider society are barely present beyond the village; and the rig is a setting more than an order the film thinks through.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep at 8.7, The Sublime and The Swerve at 8.6. A saint’s life built into the plot, its chapters stations and its community a chorus; elevation in Emily Watson’s face and in the still tableaux, gathering to dreadful summits in the second half; and a handheld camera joined to the cinema of transcendence and to a literal miracle.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.9: the sacred, the community, the family, labour, the body, medicine and the sea are held in one crisis, but everything passes through Bess’s consciousness and her marriage, history and the wider society barely appear, and the rig is a setting more than an order. Above it, The Inevitable at 8.0: a strict spine carried over about 158 minutes, with texture held past its work in the first chapters and a slack approach to the inquest.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Imperishable meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 each fall a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work is held below the summit by The Unconcealment and Pressure on Tradition, and by its aggregate, 8.4 from a sum of 100.6, against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Breaking the Waves as released, the theatrical version shown in competition at Cannes in May 1996 and released in cinemas that year, about 158 minutes (159 in some listings), in English, from the wedding to the bells: written and directed by Lars von Trier, with Peter Asmussen credited for collaboration on the dialogue, produced by Zentropa Entertainments with a European co-production, photographed by Robby Müller, edited by Anders Refn, designed by Karl Júlíusson, with the chapter tableaux by Per Kirkeby. The theatrical version is the object; television and home-video issues and restorations bear on survival only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. No line of dialogue is held to the word, so none is quoted, and speech is described. Details that could not be verified are not given, among them further writing credits, the number and titles of the chapters, the songs under the tableaux, the locations, the means by which the colour was drained, the budget and box office, whether the church has a bell, and what lies in the coffin at the burial.