I guess I have a different understanding of Jan's words to Bess.
Originally when he told her to take a lover, it was for her benefit. He wanted her to have a full life.
The first time he has to return to the hospital, after their fight, when he wakes he's only semi-aware of his surroundings. He tells Bess only love can make him better and that she must perform these 'acts of love' to heal him.
He knows she's lying about being with the doctor. He doesn't smirk, and I don't feel he's displaying jealousy. He's touched and amused that Bess thinks she can lie to him about these encounters and still stay faithful to him.
When he's delusional and mumbling about being on a bus and asking Bess to come to him, she thinks of that when she services the guy on the bus ride home from her visit to the hospital.
At her next visit Jan seems improved and asks her if she thinks people become "someone else" when they are close to death. She understands this to mean that Jan actually was the guy on the bus.
Later the doctor and her sister-in-law tell Bess at different times that Jan doesn't even know what he's telling her to do. That the fluid keeps building in his brain and "his head is full of scars".
The fact that people believe Jan was perverse boogles my mind! To say that he was enjoying hearing about these things happening to her? No. That makes no sense when you remember what the purpose of these "acts of love" was...to heal him! Also there is the fact that each time Jan was at death's door, he called for Bess. I do not doubt he loved her very deeply.
Lars von Trier was brilliant, IMO, by not showing us scenes of Bess telling Jan about any of her further encounters with men, after being on the bus. She even tells the doctor that she often doesn't have to say anything because Jan knows what she's thinking. Because of this, we are left to our own imaginations about what she tells Jan.
I believe she didn't tell him about how awful these situations were for her. She doesn't tell him that she cried every time and that she was abused by the men and in other ways by the people of the town. I think she made each experience loving for Jan's benefit when she told him about it.
Honestly, how could Jan have "healed" to a degree after each of her...essentially, rapes!, if she were telling him how much it hurt her physically and emotionally to do it? That makes absolutely no sense! It would have hurt him more, caused his morale to sink even further, made him want to give up on life. But if she were making up stories of love and tenderness, as he had shown to her before his accident, it could cause him to rally, try to hang on for her because he knew she couldn't take it if he died.
And she's convinced that because she ran from the sadists on the big ship, Jan got worse and signed for her to be committed to a mental hospital. So she escapes and returns to that ship to allow the men to torture her to make up for her failing Jan by running from them the first time.
We don't really know how bad her injuries were, but I believe she died because her faith in her actions and their positive effect on Jan was finally broken when she asked Dodo if he were better and was told he wasn't. "oh...maybe I was wrong..." She died because she gave up, which is what she thought she was keeping Jan from doing the whole time.
And after he heals we see over and over the ways that Jan truly loved Bess. His asking the priest to ask the elders to show leinancy, stealing her body and filling the coffin with sand, crying when she was buried at sea, and then his joy when they hear the bells.
Jan a bad guy? Not possible in my interpretation of the film.
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