'The Idiots' & 'Breaking The Waves'

The films are directed by Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier and are part of his “Golden Heart Trilogy” along with the previously reviewed Dancer in the Dark.

Both films are also part of the Dogme 95 genre, partially started by Von Trier in an attempt to make as natural of a film as possible: All shot on location, no artificial lighting, no soundtrack or score, no filters, no special effects and all in color. Basically, trying to make the film as much like actual life as possible. 

The Idiots was the first of these films for Lars Von Trier and depending on your definition of success, it was a relative failure. Both films had multiple infractions including sets, altering of light and the such. Doesn’t make the films bad, but it does sort of cheapen what those filmmakers were aiming to do. If your first movie can’t follow the rules, does it matter if the others can? Doesn’t seem any film has fit the Dogme 95 platitudes. 

The Idiots is about a group of young Danish men and women who go into public and act like mentally disabled (and physically disabled) individuals. Sort of ironically, they’re more anti-bourgeois group as much as they’re proponents for understanding and respecting the rights of the mentally and physically handicapped. They do it to waylay their inhibitions and to live freer. 

This film is notable (not only is it really, really good) for having unsimulated sex in a group sex scene, something brought on by Von Trier, but rarely duplicated. Due to the fact that it’s real people having real sex and folks can’t handle that. 

Breaking the Waves is about a religious woman – you sort of suspect that she’s extremely naïve or possible mentally handicapped – who marries a Norwegian oil rig worker and finds herself struggling with the time apart as he works in the middle of the ocean. After a brief respite at home, he returns to the rig and is paralyzed after an accident. 

After a failed suicide attempt, he urges his wife to take a lover. Maybe not so much for her as it’s for him in some sort of odd cuckolding fetish. She struggles with the request and eventually gets caught in this desire to be happy and the repercussions of being a harlot in a non-progressive religious community. 

Von Trier, in most of his movies, eventually puts the viewer no trial, so to speak. He challenges our beliefs in very raw, uncomfortable scenes. He places people in impossible situations that often fail and leave them has lost as they were before.