This is a movie I worry about each time prior to watching. I worry, because it’s one of those movies whose impact you never want to lose, but because the first time you see it, that impact is all to do with things you don’t know, each subsequent viewing could just be that one too many where it’s no longer new and for some reason or other, it might leave you cold. Yet each time I do pluck up the courage to watch, I remember, this thing is never going to die. I’ve seen it countless times, and there’s still always something else in it to catch me off guard. I thought that the first viewing of this movie would always be the best memory – when you don’t see the ending coming, and the way it’s only hinted at so very slightly early on, but just enough that it all fits together (something Lars Von Trier is ingenius at) – but now I find, when you know the ending, the movie is even more painful to watch. Once you really know Bess, once you know where she’s going, and what’s more, that what you want to believe is true, the way she’s treated and the way she reacts to her treatment is utterly awful. Like Lars Von Trier’s latest movie Dogville, this movie can be clearly interpreted as a modern Christ story (I apologise if I seem to be comparing everything to religious matters recently, it’s big on my mind I guess lol) – Bess is a Jesus figure. The chapters are titled stuff like “Faith” and “Bess’s sacrifice” (not the DVD chapters, the actual movie has elaborately designed chapter plates). She is treated absolutely horrendously but the way she resigns herself to it, to her ultimate destiny, it’s unbelievable. I love the moment when she says, “I have always been stupid.” It’s like, wow, yes you are not a genius in the conventional sense, but you are anything but stupid. She walks into the church where women are not allowed and says something that really resonates with me recently, the love-hate relationship I have with words: “I don’t understand… what you’re saying. How can you love a word? You cannot love words. You cannot be in love with a word. You can love another human being. That’s perfection.” It’s Bess’s total moment of clarity, her most eloquent phase, and it says everything. And it made me realise on this viewing how sparse words are in the movie, and perhaps that’s why it hits me so hard. Lars Von Trier presents humans in a way I really love – he doesn’t deny, like all of us do to some extent every day – that we are basically animals.

Another aspect of the movie that hit me on this viewing was Katrin Cartlidge, who died since the movie was made, way too young. She was an amazing actress, and here she plays her character so heartbreakingly – the way she puts a bright face on everything, the way she seems to be conformist, but she has her own way of upholding her own definitions of what’s right, and finally the way she breaks at Bess’s death and burial and shows that anyone can act like Bess did, anyone can succomb to their basic animal human feelings, you never know when it’s coming, but there is something in this world for everyone that will make them break. This movie is perfection.

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