This is the 3rd film of Austrian director Jessica Hausner I’ve seen in the last 2 months. She has a deliberately flattened out documentary-like style, acting is underplayed, emotion is understated – the tone consciously ambiguous, and so restrained it feels like the narrative is being willfully withheld, daring you to give up on it. Too much withholding (in Hotel); but the ambiguity at the heart of Lovely Rita was genuinely disturbing.
So is this going to be a cynical look at the Lourdes industry? I don’t think so. Too obvious. Something more mysterious – and enigmatic.
Like being miraclised!
I put an exclamation mark there as something cheeky and ironic. I didn’t mean it to happen.
But it did. And not as something cheeky or ironic either.
But also not as something stupendously melodramatic.
This film does miracles without exclamation marks.
I learn – from a priest – that miracles happen on the inside as well as the outside; healing from within of some inner affliction like despair or cynicism is just as much a miracle as a paralysed person walking again.
So will Christine – in a wheelchair with MS – walk again? Because the inner transformation doesn’t seem to be happening. She’s just there filling in a week because life at home is lonely.
And then it happens. A round of applause! Give thanks to the Virgin Mary and our Lady of Lourdes. Christine even gets “Best Pilgrim of the Year Award”.
And falls down again. “If it doesn’t last then it was not a miracle. So He is not in charge. Who is then?”
Hausner has hit the right balance, has not taken sides. Yes, there is hypocrisy. Yes, the piety can be a bit phony. Human nature can be too small to accept great things. “I hope to be the right person” says Christine, to be worthy of receiving Gods grace. Even though she has had little Faith, has not been a Believer.
Its been a small slow (back of the head) kind of film. I felt as small as Christine. In her wheelchair. Or out of it.
Dir: Jessica Hausner, France/Austria
7/10
