Amazon.com video review:
Set in an unmercifully rugged, coastal village in Scotland in
the 1970s, this extraordinary film by Lars von Trier stars British
actress Emily Watson as a barely contained naive named Bess, who holds
regular conversations with God and whose pure and intensely personal
faith is hardly tolerated by the gruesome Calvinist elders of her
church. Bess marries an oil-rig worker (Stellan Skarsgard) and comes
to believe that erotic discovery is a part of God's grand plan. But
after her spouse is hurt in an accident, she decides that divine
instruction is leading her toward the life of a prostitute--with
disastrous but somehow beautiful results. Von Trier (The
Kingdom) has made a wonderful, entirely unexpected, and rigorous
work of discovery in this film, with a formal visual design that
recalls classic films by Carl Theodor Dreyer and Robert
Bresson. Watson is a phenomenon, her wide-eyed wonder at the world as
God's handiwork a breathtaking portrayal of conviction. --Tom
Keogh
