`BREAKING THE WAVES' RISES ABOVE MOVIE TIDE : THE FACTS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

Some films - a very, very select few - aim so high and achieve so much, they overcome flaws that would wreck lesser movies. ``Breaking the Waves'' is one of those films.

The winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival, this aching inquiry into the mysteries of love, sex and faith is an unquestionable triumph for its star, Emily Watson. In her first movie, the young English actress walks any number of tightropes, all strung with emotional razor wire: ecstasy and masochism, lust and sacrifice, derangement and grace, idiocy and transcendence.

Through it all, Watson projects a kind of addled, natural innocence that brings winning poignancy to a highly sophisticated performance. And while she's playing a woman capable of slipping into a dark mental abyss at any given moment, Watson's sense of behavior is impressively sure-footed. It's the most daring and accomplished movie acting you'll see this year.

Would that the whole film, which was written and directed by Denmark's Lars von Trier, were as uncompromising as its lead actress. This is not to say that ``Breaking the Waves'' is not serious in a punishing, art-movie kind of way. To begin with, it's all shot in nausea-inducing, hand-held Cinemascope (brilliantly, if woozily, by Wim Wenders' cinematographer Robby Muller). And it doesn't shy away from either Big Thoughts or frank perversity.

In the end, however, von Trier tosses in a commercially friendly dose of spiritual sentimentality. It doesn't ruin ``Waves' '' harrowing grandeur, but it is kind of like ending ``Leaving Las Vegas'' with a successfully completed 12-step program.

Set in the 1970s on a particularly godforsaken (but thoroughly God-obsessed) stretch of the Scottish coast, the story commences with the wedding of lightly loony local lass Bess (Watson) to life-loving Jan (Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard), a Scandinavian worker from one of the offshore oil rigs. The tight-knit town's severe, Calvinist elders feel no good can come from one of their daughters marrying an outsider. But then, they're the kind of dour, coercive sorts who won't let their women attend funerals or speak in church, either.

All the more annoying, then, when their prophecy fulfills itself. But first there's the honeymoon, in which virginal Bess discovers that she likes sex a lot. So much, in fact, that when Jan inevitably has to return to the oil rig, it leaves her in a state of howling despair.

But she is a product of her environment, so she prays directly to God for her husband's swift return. As stern as the men she has grown up with, He responds - in her voice, in her body - with a question: How badly do you want him here? When Jan is returned to her, paralyzed from the neck down by a drilling accident, Bess learns just how bad it can be.

But lusty Jan, who's either demented from despair and drugs or truly sensitive to his wife's unleashed libido or gone completely perverted (admirably, the film never settles on one simple motive), tells Bess that he wants her to take on lovers and describe the liaisons to him. Brimming with guilt, the none-too-bright woman complies, under increasingly degrading circumstances that turn her into a community pariah. Yet every time she commits one of these sins, Jan's health takes a miraculous turn for the better.

God does, after all, work in mysterious ways. But so does the devil, and of course the human mind. As heartbreaking as Bess' sexual sacrifices become, they'd mean more if von Trier had kept things strictly psychological and free of hokey mysticism.

This otherwise unrelentingly realistic movie also could have done without the computer colorized chapter headings, prettified Scottish landscapes that introduce each major sequence accompanied by von Trier's most obnoxious ploy of all: the worst '70s pop hits he could dredge up.

But von Trier, who is probably best-known in America for the more phantasmagorical ``Zentropa,'' explores territory of the human soul here that hasn't been charted as boldly since Ingmar Bergman's heyday. He also draws fine work out of Skarsgard, Katrin Cartlidge as Bess' concerned sister-in-law and Adrian Rawlins as a skeptical doctor won over by Bess' gonzo purity.

The purity of Watson's performance should win every heart it touches.

The film: ``Breaking the Waves'' (R; sex, nudity, language, drug use, violence).

The stars: Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgard, Katrin Cartlidge, Adrian Rawlins.

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Lars von Trier. Produced by Vibeke Windelov and Peter Aalbaek Jensen. Released by October Films.

Running time: Two hours, 36 minutes.

Playing: Laemmle Royal, West L.A.

Our rating: Four stars