Divine comedy?

Breaking ranks on Lars von Trier

My Phoenix colleague Peter Keough called Breaking the Waves the best film of 1996; and I'm inclined to agree about the movie's startlingly fresh first hour. Until Jan (Stellan Skarsgård), the husband, is bedridden after the industrial accident.

Am I alone in being totally creeped out by the last act of Breaking the Waves? You know, those stomach-churning scenes in which the starry-eyed heroine, Bess (Emily Watson), bows to the perverted -- I don't use that word lightly!! -- commands of her crippled spouse. He can no longer perform, so he orders her to sleep around, because he gets turned on vicariously by Bess's adultery. In obedience, she beds down with every smelly lowlife and sexual criminal around. She submits herself to the most abusive and perilous of misalliances.

How abusive? She screws one filthy sailor while another, a sadistic psycho (the frightening Udo Kier), pokes her with a knife in the back. Afterward, Bess goes back for more to the ship's hellish hold, getting beaten and scarred. Her sliced, jigsaw-puzzle face looks as if it had gone through several windshields.

Gross!

Why hasn't there been a feminist outcry against Breaking the Waves? Especially when it's so very clear that Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier approves of his heroine's sacrifice for her man. More than approves: celebrates! Bess's debasement is seen by Trier (supposedly, a recent Catholic convert) as a sacramental Christian act: she is raped to death so that her husband can live!

There's hardly a more obscene conclusion in current movies than Trier's "divine comedy" dénouement: Bess's ascension into heaven. Baloney! Those aren't God's bells dangling in the clouds above the movie. Those are chauvinist Trier's balls.

TRIER'S INSPIRATION is the on-screen religiosity of his fellow countryman and mentor, Carl Dreyer (1889-1968), Denmark's most esteemed filmmaker for The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vampyr, and Day of Wrath. And by a lucky chance the Harvard Film Archive has programmed (February 2 through 6) Trier's most direct borrowing, Dreyer's masterly Ordet (1954), projected in a luminous 35mm print.

As much as a medieval painter of icons, Dreyer was bent on revealing, in Ordet, Jehovah's handiwork. He wished to demonstrate to an agnostic, rational era that we are living still in an age of miracles. No, God isn't dead.

Dreyer's setting for his revelations couldn't be more humble: an out-of-the-way farmhouse on the North Sea. There, a patriarchal farmer, an avid churchgoer, rules his household. But one adult son, Mikkel, has ceased to believe. Far more troubling, and bizarre, the other son, Johannes, has gone mad while studying Kierkegaard at the university. He has returned home insisting he is the Savior.

"I am the Light!" he proclaims, but in a mournful, defeated voice, because nobody believes him for a second. Indeed, fuzzy-faced Johannes is a sad sight. After delivering his own version of the Sermon on the Mount, he retires to his room, his energy sapped. He might be Jesus, but he probably needs a nap.

That's the set-up. But Dreyer does what Lars von Trier can't: he scales the stairway to Heaven. Ordet catapults into the transcendent, with an extraordinary, New Testament-affirming conclusion. Hallelujah! (And though the movie is more than 40 years old, I won't give away the ending. Go see Ordet for intellectually thrilling born-again cinema!)

THE COOLIDGE CORNER starts a commendable Monday-night series of Chinese-language films from Taipei on February 3 with Pushing Hands, the wonderful 1991 first film of the distinguished Taiwanese-American director Ang Lee. Lee has gone on, of course, to make acclaimed features: A Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman, and the multi-Oscar winner Sense and Sensibility. But his talents are already in place with Pushing Hands, a tender, affecting tale of a retired tai chi master whose life turns problematic when he comes to New York to reside with his married son and the son's less-than-supportive wife.

She gets huffy because old Mr. Chu invades her space with his tai chi exercises, wok cooking, and videotapes of Chinese movies. On the other hand, Chu hasn't the slightest interest in learning English or anything American. Soon he buries himself in Chinatown, where he meets a spunky Chinese widow. Their November romance is touching and charming, and director Ang Lee never compromises his story with any contrived cross-cultural understanding.

Let's hope the Coolidge holds Pushing Hands for a run. The Taipei series continues with Five Girls and a Rope on February 10, Pan Yu-Liang: A Woman Artist on February 17, Green Snake on February 24, and Love Is Sweet on March 3.

BOSTON GLOBE book editor Gail Caldwell has written the finest article yet -- "Disregarding Henry," on January 21 -- about why Jane Campion erred in the most fatal way in her adaptation of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. It's a must-read. n