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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.