Opiniões dos críticos

The roughness of the style—it’s like listening to a punk song. And I really loved the way that the female character is portrayed. There is something very disturbing and strong about the tension between sexual energy and spiritual searching.

Terrific though it is, Breaking The Waves is, in one respect, an unusual choice for the Criterion Collection, which has released it in its now-standard DVD/Blu-ray combo package. Though shot on celluloid, this is one cruddy-looking movie; Von Trier and cinematographer Robby Müller prioritize the performances at all costs... [Still,] Breaking The Waves showcases [Von Trier] at his most pure and vulnerable, and it remains a bracing experience.

Above all, though, it's a thrilling, utterly unpredictable suspense story that propelled von Trier to global recognition as one of the most adventurous writer-directors on the contemporary scene, and easily the most gifted one to come from Scandinavia since Ingmar Bergman emerged in the 1940s.

Breaking the Waves is so irresolvable and so disturbing because it's a romantic deconstruction of romanticism; von Trier links intense love to the domineering platitudes of traditional religious trials of faith through their mutual capacity for masochism. The grand gestures that Bess commits exist for their own sake, as her self-inflictions arguably surpass the brutality she's undergoing them to absolve.

It’s a testament to Emily Watson’s astounding performance as Bess that she comes across as more than a von Trier construct; she’s a woman of boundless passion, who follows her faith wherever it takes her. Her strength is the source of her vulnerability, and vice versa.

As usual, von Trier takes things to extremes without quite losing his audience and even if some viewers might find Bess's humiliation sadistically distasteful, no one could deny the power of Emily Watson's performance.

You'll leave [Breaking the Waves] weeping or arguing, but certainly not bored by a tale that ranges between the weird, the wonderful and outrageous.

You'll leave [Breaking the Waves] weeping or arguing, but certainly not bored by a tale that ranges between the weird, the wonderful and outrageous.

Von Trier has created a harshly beautiful elegy to physical passion and spiritual transcendence. It’s worth taking the risk to make a leap with Bess.

With this artlessly profound and affecting story of love, von Trier emerges as one of those blessed filmmakers... who've managed to blend their early stylistic flamboyance with enough human empathy to make their work both visually and emotionally compelling.

Ever since I first encountered Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves in Cannes, where it won the grand jury prize, I've been debating within myself about it, because I find it simultaneously shameless, boldly original, contrived, highly affecting, transparent, cynical, hopeful, ironic, sincere, ugly, beautiful, and downright baffling.

True art is a journey to somewhere you’ve never been, and there has never been a movie quite like Breaking the Waves... [It] is an experience, a movie that invites you, with moment-to-moment intimacy, to share the psychic space of its characters, to enter a world in which love, madness, sex, physical paralysis, glitter rock, and the presence of God flow in and out of each other.