The Act of the Heart Reviews

A slight but finely acted film, featuring Bujold as an innocent, strictly raised country girl who goes to Montreal to become the guardian of a precocious child. Traumatized by the child's death in a sports accident, she turns to a local priest, Sutherland, of whom she has long been enamored, blurting out her love for him. Sutherland accepts her love and leaves the priesthood to marry her, but turns out to be a total failure in the secular world. This is a bleak, mundane story which nevertheless stays in the mind, and which ends on a note of high drama.