If the sign of a true artist is his willingness to risk making a fool of himself—and it is—Lars von Trier is angling for his own museum wing. Breaking the Waves, the first English-language film by the gifted Danish filmmaker, lunges for profundity with a ferocity that verges on, and often plunges into, sheer foolhardiness. It fuses the tawdry and the sacred with wide-eyed conviction; it yokes a sophisticated cinematic technique to attitudes that predate cinema.

Try to describe this peculiarly powerful movie to someone else, and it comes off sounding like a crackpot scrambling of Belle de Jour, Indecent Proposal, and the lugubrious 1948 religious drama The Miracle of the Bells—the one in which Frank Sinatra played a holy man. And yet it’s rescued from absurdity by the astonishing performance of first-time film actress Emily Watson—and the staggering intensity of von Trier’s filming, which leaves no room for doubt or incredulity.

A modern-day morality play set in a remote Scottish town, Breaking the Waves demands from viewers the same unquestioning faith shown by its heroine, Bess, a pious, sheltered young woman who spends her afternoons cleaning the local church. An innocent whose faith borders on mania, Bess intends to marry Jan (Stellan Skarsgard), a worker on an offshore oil rig. The elders in her strict Calvinist church disapprove, but she convinces them that her marriage to Jan will only unite her and her husband-to-be with God.

They marry; they make love constantly, in a blissful fusion of physical and spiritual love. But when Jan is summoned back to the oil rig, Bess is heartbroken. In a fit of despair, she prays to God for his return. She is answered, all right, but with the cruelest of cosmic jokes. An accident has left Jan paralyzed from the neck down, with little chance of recovery.

At this point, the story takes a twist that joins the sinful and the sacred in a way few filmmakers would dare. (As Althea Flynt complains in The People vs. Larry Flynt, nobody wants their pornography mixed up with their religion. As if they could exist separately.) Distraught by the thought of Bess never enjoying her blossoming sexuality again, Jan demands that his devoted bride make a pact with him: She must take new lovers and dutifully report to him where and how they touch her. Bess, mortified, begs him to reconsider. But when his condition worsens, she sees her defilement as a necessary sacrifice—a test from God.

Except that God isn’t half the control freak von Trier is. The writer-director engineers Bess’ descent into sin with a single-mindedness that will strike viewers as either shattering, sick, or utterly ridiculous. (To be honest, if I’d seen the movie in proper conditions, at somewhere other than the Belcourt, I might’ve been swept away by it—but more about that later.) The whole movie is so titanically overwrought that we can’t just see Bess having sex with strangers; we have to see her weeping or shrieking throughout or throwing up afterward, as if we would otherwise think she were having a ball.

Most perverse of all is that von Trier makes her devotion directly proportional to her debasement—the nastier the things he forces Bess to do, the holier she’s made to appear. This is probably intended as a commentary on the true nature of spiritual purity, but if Bess has truly convinced herself she’s being intimate with Jan (and God) through other men, why is she so miserable?

Somehow, though, von Trier has found the one visual style in all of moviemaking that could keep disbelief at bay. If he’d shot the movie in black-and-white, he’d’ve ended up with the artsiest kitsch this side of Josef von Sternberg. If he’d shot the movie in livid color, the movie would’ve turned into glossy, heavy-breathing camp—a passion play staged in the palette of Douglas Sirk, if not Pedro Almodovar. (Oh, what Almodovar could do with this premise.)

Instead, von Trier and his excellent cinematographer, Robby Müller, adopted a risky visual scheme that involved shooting the film with hand-held cameras in Super 35mm, digitally transferring the results to video, then transferring them back to film. In the process, the images lose their sharpness, and the colors fade to ruddy, earthy tones, giving the movie the weather-beaten look of a worn photograph. When combined with the discomforting intimacy of the camera, which zeroes in on the principals with the relentlessness of an eyewitness news crew, the characters’ emotions seem shockingly immediate, even as the images retain a timeless quality. The look saves the movie: It gives the plot’s often ludicrous melodrama the grandeur, and gravity, of an ancient myth.

Bess’ devotion to God is matched only by the complete obeisance of Emily Watson, a British stage actress making her film debut, to von Trier’s vision. (For the movie to work, the director couldn’t permit anything less.) A better-known actress could not have pulled off the role: Any trace of celebrity would’ve shattered the audience’s belief in this figure of mystical purity. But Watson carries the burden. On the few occasions we see the gray, craggy landscape in long shot, light shimmers across water and shadows flicker and shift on the land; waves of fury, sorrow, ecstasy, and beatitude ripple in similar fashion across Watson’s radiant face, with its enormous dark-rimmed eyes and raw gash of a mouth. She transforms Bess’ spirit into a force of nature; even when we gasp in shock at her character’s actions, she hurtles us along in her wake. This remarkable actress never betrays our faith.

But the abysmal conditions under which the movie is being screened at the Belcourt do. Lars von Trier is a filmmaker of formidable talents, and in Breaking the Waves he has made a movie that requires the audience’s complete immersion in the story. This is impossible, however, when the left side of the frame bleeds off onto a wall, the right side is partially obscured by the shadow of a curtain, and the entire film seems projected by candlelight. One of the movie’s most praised effects involves computer-enhanced landscape shots that serve as chapter headings for the story; as shown at the Belcourt, these images might as well be GAF Viewmaster slides illuminated by a flashlight beam. The audience around me started laughing from the moment the director’s name appeared as “Ars von Trier.”

I admit that it is unfair to judge von Trier’s work in these circumstances. But since the Belcourt is the only theater in town showing Breaking the Waves, that’s the only way you or I will get to see it. Had we seen the movie with better projection—I won’t even get started on the Belcourt’s tinny, muffled sound—we might’ve seen and admired the masterpiece so many reviewers have proclaimed. Instead, yet again, Nashville audiences saw a great filmmaker’s work kneecapped by indifferent projection and lousy facilities.

Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately, if it gets something done—this reputation is spreading outside Nashville. At a Belcourt press screening last week of the engaging new comedy-drama Traveller, the film’s star, Bill Paxton, apologized to reviewers for the poor projection, which he felt did a disservice to the work of the director, Twister cinematographer Jack Green. The movie is distributed by October Films, which, coincidentally, distributes Breaking the Waves and rivals Miramax for supremacy of the art-film market.

Next time you see the first few letters of a title lopped off the screen at the Belcourt, or you see unusually dim projection, don’t yell at the theater staff, a bunch of die-hard widescreen movie lovers. Don’t even call Carmike. Just call the distributor or the movie studio, and let them know what’s going on. The number for October Films in New York is (212) 539-4000.—Jim Ridley

Stern Intervention

Go to any Internet search engine, type in the keywords “Howard Stern,” and watch what pops up: literally hundreds of roughly assembled Web pages from fans and fellow travelers of the self-proclaimed King of All Media. The pages are remarkable for their crudeness and for their general level of incomprehensibility. They’re a mix of self-promotion, foul language, and general lashing out at some vaguely defined other. They also offer links to pictures of naked women—although, perhaps tellingly, more sites promise naked women than actually deliver.

Private Parts, the new movie based on Stern’s autobiography, delivers plenty of naked women. About every 15 minutes, whether appropriate or not, women wander onscreen and take off their clothes—perhaps as a sop to Stern’s fans, who have had to rely on his radio show and their imaginations for almost two decades now. Never let it be said that Howard Stern doesn’t know what his public wants.

Still, for all the gratuitous nudity, the surprise of Private Parts, as many have pointed out, is how sweet-natured it is. Directed by Betty Thomas, and starring Stern as himself, Private Parts follows Stern’s life from birth, through awkward adolescence, to his earliest failures in radio and, finally, to his triumph as the number-one deejay in New York City. Along the way, the film covers Stern’s unique relationship with his supremely understanding wife Allison, and his gradual realization that he’s at his best on the radio when he just says whatever’s on his mind.

Of course, like many shy teenagers who grow up to have mass-media soapboxes—think Robert Crumb or Hugh Hefner—what’s mostly on Howard’s mind is sex. The best parts of Private Parts concern Stern’s battles with station managers who want to keep him under control without losing the high ratings his dirty talk brings. The central section of the film describes his rise to national prominence on WNBC, where he pushes the envelope of broadcasting standards almost exclusively as a way of torturing his boss, an arrogant stuffed shirt Stern dubs Pig Vomit (played with welcome nuance by Paul Giamatti).

Some critics have complained that Private Parts soft-pedals Stern and is selective about his past. They have a point—Stern’s racially insensitive humor is all but ignored, and the film ends in 1985, without covering all the times he’s been fired from stations and fined by the FCC—but, frankly, who cares? The reality presented in Private Parts is far more entertaining than the truth. Besides, Stern isn’t exactly a hatemonger. He just likes to find taboos and dance around them. To take Stern seriously is to give him and his off-color thoughts more power than they deserve.

Indeed, although the film tries several times to make a case for Stern’s “genius,” the bottom line is that it’s difficult to pin down what makes the man so charismatic. Having listened to his show on quite a few occasions, I can attest to the fact that he’s hard to switch off. Stern tells long, digressive stories that are abusive to celebrities, assaultive to hypocrisy, and amusingly self-aggrandizing. In fact, if he weren’t so inclined to the foul, Stern might become the well-loved national treasure he longs to be. As it is, though, he’s a proxy vent to his listeners’ repression, a mere distraction to the nation at large, and a hero only to the overstimulated geeks who build shrines to him on the Internet.

To that point, the most revealing moment in Private Parts comes right after the opening credits, as Stern walks off the stage of the MTV Video Awards—just after his infamous appearance as Fartman, the flatulent superhero whose adventures Howard had planned to commit to celluloid before the deal (thankfully) fell through. Backstage, a gauntlet of rock stars stares at Howard with disgust and pity, as he meekly walks past them in his ridiculous costume. The look on Howard’s face expresses profound fear and self-realization—as though he were suddenly aware that, for all his loquaciousness and quick wit, he’s limited by his formula and his audience’s expectations. In an otherwise breezy picture it’s a moment of real insight—that as much money as Howard Stern makes, the best he’ll ever really be is a smutty joke.—Noel Murray