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Breaking the Waves



Lars von Trier became an international sensation with this galvanizing realist fable about sex and spiritual transcendence. Emily Watson stuns, in an Oscar-nominated performance, as Bess, a simple, pious newlywed in a tiny Scottish village who gives herself up to a shocking form of martyrdom after her husband (Stellan Skarsgård) is paralyzed in an oil-rig accident. Breaking the Waves, both brazen and tender, profane and pure, is an examination of the expansiveness of faith and of its limits.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Selected-scene audio commentary featuring director Lars von Trier, editor Anders Refn, and location scout Anthony Dod Mantle
• New interview with filmmaker and critic Stig Björkman
• New interviews with actors Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgård
• Interview from 2004 with actor Adrian Rawlins
• Watson’s audition tape, with commentary by von Trier
• Deleted and extended scenes, with commentary by von Trier
• Deleted scene featuring the late actor Katrin Cartlidge
• Cannes Film Festival promotional clip
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• One Blu-ray and two DVDs, with all content available in both formats
• PLUS: An essay by critic David Sterritt

Looks like a great set, glad I never dropped big bux for the crummy Artisan disc-- we should have figured this would be coming sooner to coincide with Nyphomaniac

I wonder if there's any chance this one will restore the original "Life on Mars" music cue.

Very excited for this. I have been wanting to see this for half a decade at least.

Hope they've sorted the music rights issue that existed with the VHS/DVD release and have restored the use of Bowie's 'Life On Mars?' for the final chapter. It was replaced by an Elton John song for home media. ('Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road' I think.)

"Your Song," actually. I remember being so pissed about that when I got the original Criterion release. "But I bought it on laserdisc! I should be special! Waaah!"

aox wrote:Very excited for this. I have been wanting to see this for half a decade at least.

It's not that obscure! Certainly my Blockbuster had it, and I saw it in a multiplex at the time of release.

In aox's defense, the film was released theatrically way more than half a decade ago. And in my city, Blockbuster has been extinct for half a decade.

So excited about this one, seems they really pulled out all the stops for the bonus features, too. Bring on Dancer in the Dark next, Criterion!

Or how about the ridiculously underrated masterpiece of the Dogme movement The Idiots. With these supplements for starters: the making-of doc The Humiliated and a full English translation of Von Trier's production diary.

Would love to see them take on my personal favorite of the initial Dogme run, Mifune, especially since the OOP Sony disc was fullframe (Though I already have it via the Danish Dogme box in addition to the Sony disc so it'd be a triple dip)

No judgment inferred, I just didn't realize this was difficult to see these days. Great movie, so hopefully it will have been worth your wait! 4k restoration for a film with a video intermediate...oh Lars, you crazy guy.

domino harvey wrote:Would love to see them take on my personal favorite of the initial Dogme run, Mifune, especially since the OOP Sony disc was fullframe (Though I already have it via the Danish Dogme box in addition to the Sony disc so it'd be a triple dip)

A dogme box of any sort seems like a no-brainer. Sony's Mifune is full frame Academy...if that's what you mean? It does however have horrible audio (worse than it should be I think despite the restrictions) and a PAL to NTSC transfer. Is the Dogme box version of Mifune ok?

I'll be interested to see what the 4k restoration was done from. If I recall, LVT shot on 35mm then had it transferred to video then back to film to give it a degraded look. This was the first of his I saw back in the theater back at the beginning of my explorations of "Art" cinema. Always glad to see another CC Laserdisc get re-issued as well.

domino harvey wrote:Would love to see them take on my personal favorite of the initial Dogme run, Mifune

Or even better, The King is Alive

Just caught the new Janus restoration (currently available on Showtime onDemand for the next few months) and noticed a few things:

1. This looks gorgeous!

2. In the 2nd Chapter when the elders at the burial are condemning the deceased to hell, they refer to him as Anthony Dod Mantle. Wasn't familiar with his work the first time around, though this time I almost spit out my coffee laughing.

3. "Life On Mars" has indeed been reinstated.

warren oates wrote:Or how about the ridiculously underrated masterpiece of the Dogme movement The Idiots. With these supplements for starters: the making-of doc The Humiliated and a full English translation of Von Trier's production diary.

I'm happy to see Criterion get Breaking The Waves, but The Idiots is by far my top choice of LVT titles, followed by Riget, 2 titles that are certainly more "obscure" (or at least more limited theatrical release in the US when they came out) than BTW (which screened locally for me, the other 2 did not). Furthermore, The Idiots screened in the US with black bars over men's private parts to protect us from the horror.

Seeing The Idiots in the theater, even in that shabbily censored form, was one of the greatest movie-going experiences of my life. We went on a lark, interested in the idea but with no notion of how seriously or how far Von Trier would take it or how completely he'd transcend his initial inspiration. We walked out in a daze and ran into some friends who'd caught the previous show and were equally blown away. The Idiots is also the reason I went region-free and the single pivotal title that made me take a second look at Von Trier's entire output before and since.

Lars - does it look like it's from the film negatives, or is it the version that's gone through video processing?

It was quite grainy, so I think I'd guess the latter.

warren oates wrote:Seeing The Idiots in the theater, even in that shabbily censored form, was one of the greatest movie-going experiences of my life. We went on a lark, interested in the idea but with no notion of how seriously or how far Von Trier would take it or how completely he'd transcend his initial inspiration. We walked out in a daze and ran into some friends who'd caught the previous show and were equally blown away. The Idiots is also the reason I went region-free and the single pivotal title that made me take a second look at Von Trier's entire output before and since.

The thing I always loved about the Dogme films was the way that after dogmatically stating all of the rules and setting up the system, Von Trier always ends up breaking them, or at the very least bending them, in his own works! From the chapter cards (and ending! Which I really didn't like for many years but having recently watched Ordet seems rooted in a long and noble tradition!) in this film to the musical sequences shot with the 107 cameras in Dancer In The Dark, or the body doubles in The Idiots (the only 'official', numbered Dogme film), or the ghosts in The Kingdom!, I loved that Von Trier was suggesting that while it is important to create a dogmatic framework to provide structure to the work, that is only a starting point from which you go on to 'break the rules' dependant on what is required for your story. So the fluid, handheld camerawork capturing raw emotion and unguarded moments (along with those jarring jump edits, the crucial nature of which often seems underestimated) remains, while everything else gets manipulated.

Which is why I would class 1987's Epidemic (a key film) and the 2000s Dogville and Manderlay (but really any of the later films from documentaries to sci-fis) as just a more complicated version of what was being done with the 'official' Dogme films. And with this recent run of films from Antichrist on, it seems that Von Trier is moving towards melding the heavily stylised Europa/Element of Crime world with the Dogme performance layer.

colinr0380 wrote:The thing I always loved about the Dogme films was the way that after dogmatically stating all of the rules and setting up the system, Von Trier always ends up breaking them, or at the very least bending them, in his own works! From the chapter cards (and ending! Which I really didn't like for many years but having recently watched Ordet seems rooted in a long and noble tradition!) in this film to the musical sequences shot with the 107 cameras in Dancer In The Dark, or the body doubles in The Idiots (the only 'official', numbered Dogme film), or the ghosts in The Kingdom!, I loved that Von Trier was suggesting that while it is important to create a dogmatic framework to provide structure to the work, that is only a starting point from which you go on to 'break the rules' dependant on what is required for your story.

As you mention, Idiots is the only LvT Dogme movie. His other films, while sharing some similarities in terms of aesthetics follow almost none of the Dogme rules, and and should not be considered canonical at all. Strangely enough Dogme became a catch-all for anything with a hand-held camera.

Regardless, your point stands that most LvT movies follow a particular technical framework that he manipulates for his desired results. The 4 Obstructions being an obvious externalization of the process. I think the playfulness is what makes these otherwise overtly earnest films special.

Beaver

Pretty strong colour change. At least people can't accuse it of being teal...

Wow, that is a significant change. I think it looks great though. Certainly much different from the version I watched most recently on Showtime On Demand. The color scheme of such version was actually one of the only flaws I had with the film, which I happened to really like otherwise.

Oh my goodness, this looks incredible. I was having second thoughts about my preorder, but not anymore.