JERUSALEM Movie Review

Sweden's Bille August, director of the Cannes prize-winner Pelle the Conqueror, used a celebrated, fact-based novel by Nobel Prize-winning Swedish author Selma Lagerlof as the basis for this extraordinary story of hardship and disillusionment. Set in an impoverished rural Sweden at the turn of the century, Jerusalem is a portrait of a small community torn apart not just by hunger, but by a mysterious and compelling outsider who claims to have the answer to the community's prayers. This fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist preacher (Sven-Bertil Taube) assures all in the community that God has proclaimed an end to the world in the very near future. Their only hope, he tells them, is to leave behind all their worldly possessions and accompany him on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where a Christian community organized by a mysterious woman from Chicago (Olympia Dukakis) will help them to build the New Jerusalem. Families, friends, and lovers are bitterly divided over what to do, and August follows the stories of both those who make the pilgrimage and those who stay behind. A rich, engrossing, thickly textured film about the nature of faith and about living with the choices that faith entails, Jerusalem is haunting and surprising; it's a large-scale movie with an extremely intimate focus, never forgetting the individual stories that comprise its epic design.

NEXT STOP … Pelle the Conqueror, The Emigrants, The New Land

1996(PG-13) 166m/C SW Maria Bonnevie, Ulf Friberg, Lena Endre, Pernilla August, Olympia Dukakis, Max von Sydow, Sven-Bertil Taube; D: Bille August; W: Bille August; C: Jorgen Persson; M: Stefan Nilsson. VHS FXL