GOING ALL THE WAY

By RICHARD CORLISS

Religious faith and sexual love--these warring siblings, the stuff of powerful drama, hardly ever show up together in modern films. Yet here are two on that subject, both set in bleak fundamentalist communities, both with sturdy pedigrees and eyes for Oscar. The Crucible, from Arthur Miller's 1953 play about the Salem witch trials, has the year's classiest cast, led by Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, Paul Scofield and Joan Allen. Breaking the Waves, Danish director Lars Von Trier's English-language fable on the miracle of love, had critics weeping at this year's Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize. The Crucible offers solid workmanship and familiar epiphanies; Breaking the Waves is ecstasy seen from inside its heroine's great, wounded heart.

In Massachusetts in 1692 a coven of teenagers gather in a glade to invoke Satan's wrath. Though they romp in the style of sorority girls behaving like frat boys, they are witches, or at least witch wanna-bes. Their leader, Abigail (Ryder), is still steamed that her fling with John Proctor (Day-Lewis) has ended and is bent on ruining him and his saintly wife Elizabeth (Allen) by tarring them in the witch-hunt court of steely Judge Danforth (Scofield).

Outraged justice can make for pat dramatics--after all, not even Bob Dornan would sanction the public hanging of people being true to their conscience. So The Crucible has to work as glamorous set pieces for good actors. Under Nicholas Hytner's tense, suave direction, it does that, especially when the women seize center-screen: Allen's spindly radiance vs. Ryder's blood-slurping hysteria. Her cheeks flush, her winsome beauty seared with erotic rage, Ryder exposes the real roots of the piece. Forget McCarthyism; The Crucible is a colonial Fatal Attraction.

In Breaking the Waves, Bess (Emily Watson) is as driven as Abigail, as beatific as Elizabeth. This simple Scottish lass marries Jan (Stellan Skarsgard), a Scandinavian worker on an oil rig just offshore of Bess's tiny, benighted Scottish town. The church that Bess helps clean is so severe that it has no bells to ring out its worship. The frosty elders would not be pleased to know that their gentle, virginal Bess, who speaks to God and hears back from him, has been awakened, with one swift priapic thrust, to the joys of marital love. Bess responds like a child to the brand-new secrets of sex; she transforms her religious intensity into the grandeur of romantic obsession.

When Jan is injured on the job--paralyzed from the neck down and given scant chance of survival--Bess is desperate, guilt-ridden, still determined to please him. What he wants is for her to have sex with other men and tell him her adventures in baroque detail. That she has no natural taste for the job makes her mission sacred, a Calvary of carnality, and she takes to it dutifully. "I don't make love to them," she says of her conquests. "I make love to Jan, and I keep him from dying." The town thinks Bess is a witch; but she's really a saint, in martyrdom for love.

The battle of a simple country girl against a phalanx of church elders, the debate of passion vs. propriety, the close-ups of so many stern faces and one shining one--all this calls to mind The Passion of Joan of Arc, the 1928 silent masterpiece by another Dane, Carl Dreyer. Von Trier's film isn't in that class, but he gets points for wild ambition. Like Bess, the writer-director has undergone a conversion. His early pictures, Element of Crime and Zentropa, were wondrously busy examples of cinematic Euroflash; here he goes for sweeping visual sentiment. He wants to press you up against the characters, to make you feel the heat under their pale skin. So, as in his 1994 Danish TV series, The Kingdom (a bizarre blend of ER and Twin Peaks), he uses a handheld camera that swivels like a bobble-head doll. It's intimate, all right, and utterly maniacal--as deranged as the villagers think Bess has become.

In the performance that makes the movie, Watson is as dominating as Falconetti was playing Joan of Arc. Watson works her eyes and lips coquettishly, tirelessly, with an ardor rarely seen since Lillian Gish and the other white roses of the silents. She goes pop-eyed with awe at her beau's manhood; every word she speaks is an open-mouthed kiss. She acts volcanically, as any heart does when it pumps with love. She is pure emotion, naked, shameless, unmediated by discretion. These aren't attitudes of passion; this is the genuine article, take it or leave it. Even with our quibbles, we'll take it, and embrace it as tenderly as Bess does the man whose happiness she'd die for. In its pagan fervor, this is an almost religious experience.