MOTHER OF ALL STORIES.

Nothing starts a fight like a new slant on old-time religion, and Jean-Luc Godard's "Hail Mary" (New Yorker Video), which transplanted the story of the Virgin Birth to modern-day Switzerland (with Mary working at her father's gas station and Joseph as a taxi-driver), caused an uproar when it was released, in 1985. Theatres showing the film in France were vandalized, Christians around the world rose up in protest, Pope John Paul II inveighed against it, thousands of demonstrators picketed its American premiere at the New York Film Festival, and its American distributor dropped the film.

The main complaint was that the movie shows Mary--or rather, Myriem Roussel, the lithe and balletic actress who plays Mary--in the nude, yet these scenes are crucial to Godard's evocation of the Biblical story as a plausible modern reality. In a sequence dramatizing Joseph's struggle to accept the chaste love that Mary demands, she shows him the body that he may not touch, and he looks upon it with reverence and awe. Godard also invokes Mary's sense of her own body in a Freudian theme he derived from the Gospels: her torment over the abstract incest of having been impregnated (or, as Luke says, "overshadowed") by God. A subplot about a Czech professor in exile for teaching intelligent design underlines the main idea. The rapturous views of nature and the man-made world border on the idolatrous in their pure beauty. Instead of conventional images of faith, Godard offers faith in images--the proof that miracles are possible because ...