Ohhhh my goodness...I just got done watching the most disturbing movie. I usually really like those underground Sundance Film Festival movies, but I just don't know how to feel about this one. I either loved it or hated it...can't decide. But I feel the need to summarize it, so I'm going to.

It was called Breaking the Waves, and there's a really good review of it here. And there is a trailer of it here.

First of all, it was shot REALLY badly, like in a Blair Witch way. I felt like I was watching a documentary of a true story. It started out with this woman who was waiting for her groom to arrive on their wedding day. He finally got there...flew down in a helicopter (???). They got married, and all was well, except that everyone seemed annoyed that there were no bells at their church. It had also showed her asking permission from her HIGHLY strict, misogynist church to marry him. Anyway, at the reception, she took him to the bathroom and said "I want you to have me now." (They all had really thick Irish--I think--accents.) So their first time making love was in the bathroom of their wedding reception hall. She was a virgin; he wasn't. Afterwards, he said to her, "You have blood on your wedding dress." It was just REALLY strange. So then it went on to their "wedding night," which was nearly equally disturbing. It was obvious she was much more in love with him than he was with her. He seemed kind of...not all that touched by their love. Well shortly after their marriage, he had to go away for his job, which was some sort of job at a steel mill, or something. She was really miserable that he was going away and was throwing tantrums and stuff. So during the time he was away, they were showing her in church praying to God. WELL, she would talk out loud to God and then shut her eyes, get this deeper voice, and talk in what she thought was God's voice speaking to her. It is this portion of the movie where you realize that this chick is nuts. It was kind of the way Norman Bates and his mother "spoke to each other" in Psycho. So, finally, it got down to the point where her husband would be back home in 10 days, but she was praying to God, saying she just didn't have the patience to wait that long and could He please bring her husband home. Well, then her husband had an accident at work and ended up paralyzed. She felt she caused it by praying that God bring him home. Then she kept visiting him at the hospital and whatnot. This is what I don't understand, seeing as how she was crazy and stuff. But this may have really happened...or else she was imagining it, since she was nuts and all. Apparently, her husband felt really bad that he'd not be able to sleep with her anymore, so he told her to go out and get with other men. She told him she didn't want to, that she loved him. And then he started saying that she'd be doing it for him; he wanted her to tell him every detail, and it would be as though he was still able to make love to her...so I guess, in a way, he was doing it for himself. (The reviews are making it sound like he really did have her do this stuff, not that she was hallucinating.) The first guy she tried to seduce was her husband's doctor. He didn't give in. She went back to her husband and tried to tell him that they had sex, but he knew she was lying. So then he whispered in her ear, "I want you to do it with someone at the back of a bus." So the next time she got on the bus, she sat next to this old dude at the back of the bus and ~thinks of a nice way to say it~...pleasured him with her hand. These kinds of things kept going on, and got more and more severe, to the point where I wondered whether she was doing it to please her husband or if she was getting off on it. Her psychological condition got worse and worse, until they tried to put her in a mental institution again. (They said she had been in one before.) She escaped and had sex with some more guys, who roughed her up a bit. She was going around the neighborhood, and children began throwing stones at her (she was wearing sleazy clothes, so everyone thought she was a prostitute). She fled to the front of her church, while they were still following her and stoning to her. Her pastor came around, told the children to go away, but just left her lying there hurt. Her sister, who was the one who took care of her throughout the movie, came to her rescue. But she was also the nurse of the girl's paralyzed husband, who was now dying, so she had to get back to the hospital. So the girl went back to those guys who'd beat her up (no clue why), got really badly beat up, and died. There was a committee of guys at the church that decided who was good enough to deserve a proper funeral and who deserved to be "condemned to Hell." They decided that, even though she was mentally unstable, that she'd go to Hell. And it was this big ordeal that when they buried someone they thought would go to Hell, they'd say bad stuff while putting the coffin in the ground, like, "You are a sinner and deserve your fate" and crappy stuff like that. Well, right before she died, she had said to her sister, "Pray that Jan [pronounced "Yahn"...I had a Zoology teacher with that name once] gets well and gets out of his bed and walks." Jan did get better and was walking on crutches after she died. He had a bunch of his friends steal her body from the bad priest guys so she didn't have to go through the shameful, judgmental burial. And they threw her body into the ocean (or whatever body of water it was). At the very end of the movie, bells were heard ringing. They showed the bells, and they were up in the clouds, like they were bells from Heaven. (If you remember, there were no bells in their church tower.)

The more I think about it, the more I think I really liked the movie, despite that there really wasn't a happy message in it...the bells could have been, I guess. Do I still want to be a Psychologist? Hehe...yeah, I guess so. SEE THE MOVIE!

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