Act of the Heart

This is an unusual if disappointing story about a naive, young, God-drunk woman (Genevieve Bujold) who becomes increasingly despairing of the meanness of ordinary life but finds comfort in her religious fantasies and in the notion that she is special. These feelings fuse in her anguished involvement with a monk (Donald Sutherland), whom she meets while singing in a Montreal choir. Though he leaves the church to marry her, she is not content and switches her passion to the idea that a new, Christ-like martyr is needed to revive peoples' faith. In the spirit of selfless sacrifice she immolates herself -- but the horrifying deed is not believable because the film does not establish either the extreme faith or the psychotic personality that would sufficiently motivate such a deed.

This movie was the second of five that Bujold made with her husband-director Paul Almond, and followed the Canadian ghost story, ISABEL (1968).