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R: ARCHIVE, S: REVIEWS, D: 09/05/1996,

***** A Phoenix Pick *****

BREAKING THE WAVES

Danish director Lars von Trier establishes himself as a world-class filmmaker with this astounding and exhausting two-and-a-half-hour melodrama about the triumph and dementia of true love and the interconnection of depravity and beatitude. Set in the 1970s on one of Scotland's bleak North Sea islands, this is the story of Bess (Emily Watson, in a staggering performance that recalls that of Giulietta Masina in La strada,), a simple-minded young woman who claims a special relationship with God (when she prays to Him, she supplies His answers also). She upsets her closed-minded fundamentalist neighbors by marrying Jan (Stellan Skarsgård), a foreign worker on one of the offshore oil rigs, and, when he is paralyzed in an accident, further alienates them when she tries to cure him by sleeping with other men and telling him about them. With blanched color and Robbie Müller's handheld cinéma-vérité photography von Trier literally thrusts the film's over-the-top passions and pathology in your face, making Breaking the Waves an uncompromising immersion in obsession and an overwhelming emotional workout that is ultimately a religious experience. It may well be the most draining and rewarding film of the year. Screens at the Copley Place at 7:30 p.m., and on Tuesday at 7:50 p.m.

-- Peter Keough