Moving between heaven and hell, or perhaps just sky and earth, the pilgrims who walk and tremble and are sometimes pushed through “Lourdes” in wheelchairs are usually seen at a remove. One exception is Christine, a young woman with multiple sclerosis who is played by the French actress Sylvie Testud. Tucked into a wheelchair, her limbs immobile and hands tightly curled, Christine looks around her — at the other visitors, the helpful aides, the strange locale — with a gaze that seems at once incurious and beatific.
Situated in southwest France north of the Pyrenees, Lourdes is thought by Roman Catholics to have been where the impoverished 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous saw the Virgin Mary in 1858. She was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1933 and by Hollywood a decade later when her story was turned into the 1943 kitsch classic “The Song of Bernadette,” with Jennifer Jones. Millions now visit Lourdes annually to attend services and drink from and bathe in the grotto waters, thought to have healing powers. It’s been claimed that the water can cure, though, as the Lourdes Web site, lourdes-france.org, puts it: “For a modern mentality, it is difficult to say that something is ‘inexplicable.’ They can only say that it is ‘unexplained.’ ”
One of the pleasures of this intelligent, rigorously thoughtful, somewhat sly film is that it takes place in the space between the inexplicable (no explanation is possible) and the unexplained (enlightenment might be around the corner). Its director, Jessica Hausner, an Austrian working here in French, wants to explore the mysteries of life, not its certainties. One great mystery, of course, is faith itself, how people come to believe what they do and how those beliefs affect not just their thinking and feelings but also their bodies. For Christine, who speaks most profoundly through the eerie quiet of her nearly inert form — and then later through a possibly miraculous physical transformation — belief is inscribed on the body itself.
The film, which was shot on location in Lourdes — one scene features Cardinal Roger Mahony, the archbishop of Los Angeles, leading a prayer service — is largely organized around the rituals of pilgrimage. Christine, who’s closely assisted by a young woman (Léa Seydoux) who feeds and helps dress her, is pushed here and there. In one scene Christine visits the grotto, her attendant lifting her curled hand to the stone wall. Another time she visits the baths, where grotto water is poured on her head. In between, she eats and sleeps and has encounters with others (including Bruno Todeschini and a very good Elina Löwensohn). Wherever she goes, a shop selling religious souvenirs can usually be seen in the background.
Contrary to expectation, these repeated images of the souvenir shops don’t function as overt critiques, and there’s nothing in the film as crude as an indictment of the commodification of faith. Ms. Hausner, whose earlier titles include “Lovely Rita,” is more interested in the forms that faith takes, in its individual and collective ebbing and flowing. The mesmerizing opening image — a steadily framed and angled overhead shot of a cafeteria — immediately sets her parameters. As the camera holds on the image, men and women, some in wheelchairs, begin to stream in, as if carried along by some unseen force. They’re merely being seated for a meal, but the elevated angle of the shot and the way everyone drifts in together, as if each were part of a single organism, creates a sense of a collective purpose, a unified calling.
The few religious conversations in the film mostly take place at the edges of the story, among the other pilgrims, including a few women who serve as something of a humble Greek chorus. Together they help make up a convincing world inhabited by believers and skeptics whose ideas are largely voiced in asides and through their actions. In a wonderfully choreographed bit, a member of the Order of Malta, a religious group, tells a joke in which the Virgin Mary is the (mild) punch line. Meanwhile, in the background, Christine is secretly wheeled out the door by her roommate, an older woman with a lopsided mouth, Mme. Hartl (Gilette Barbier), who seems to think that her own fate is tied to the handicapped woman.
What happens to Christine is mystifying, simultaneously (as they say at Lourdes) inexplicable and unexplained. Ms. Testud, a tiny actress with an often oversize and ferocious screen presence, delivers a minutely detailed performance that telegraphs a world with a thrust of her chin, a widening of her eyes. Save for the last astonishing shot of Christine’s face — now a whirlwind of expressive feeling — Ms. Testud keeps her performance generally muted, perhaps to help safeguard Ms. Hausner’s secrets. There is, after all, so much that we can’t and don’t know. As one woman says at the end of the film, during a short discussion of God, we do not know who’s in charge. And then this same woman asks a question that puts her spiritual question into comic relief: what, she wonders, is for dessert? Mysteries, as Ms. Hausner attests, abound.
LOURDES
Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.
Written and directed by Jessica Hausner; director of photography, Martin Gschlacht; edited by Karina Ressler; production designer, Katharina Wöppermann; produced by Mr. Gschlacht, Philippe Bober and Susanne Marian; released by Palisades Tartan. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Sylvie Testud (Christine), Bruno Todeschini (Kuno), Elina Löwensohn (Cécile), Gerhard Liebmann (Pater Nigl), Gilette Barbier (Mme. Hartl), Hubsi Kramer (Herr Olivetti) and Léa Seydoux (Maria).
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