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The pilgrim at Lourdes may not be devout but she is honest.
"I am often angry," she confesses to a priest. "Why did I fall ill and not someone else? Why me?"
She is utterly dependent on others to raise food or drink to her lips, bathe and dress her and, at night, put her into bed and arrange her lifeless legs and arms, her hands curled into frozen fists.
- Starring: Sylvie Testud.
- Rating: Not rated but PG-13 in nature. In French with English subtitles.
The woman realizes there are patients worse off but longs simply for "a normal life." When she seems to undergo a miraculous cure of her multiple sclerosis, she again asks, "Why me?" while others wonder, "Why her? ... She doesn't seem very pious, our miracle girl."
"Lourdes," a French-language drama opening Friday at the Harris Theater, is an understated, intriguing and intelligent drama about miracles, humility, thorny questions about why a good and powerful God doesn't heal everyone, the physical isolation that can plague the sick and the well, the desperate desire for cures and our tenuous hold on happiness and health.
Someone who has undergone a miraculous and incredibly rare healing at Lourdes may wonder if it's temporary, but we all live with the idea that good health could disappear tomorrow. We probably just don't think about it as much, if at all.
For those without the benefit of Catholic schooling or Internet access, an estimated 6 million people, some sick and some seeking spiritual enrichment, annually flock to the place in France where the Virgin Mary appeared 18 times to a girl named Bernadette Soubirous in 1858.
Writer-director Jessica Hausner presents Lourdes as a mix of sacred and supermarket, with souvenir shops that seem transported from Broadway.
She focuses on a woman with the telling name of Christine (Sylvie Testud, who looks like a cross between Chloe Sevigny and a young Helen Mirren) who comes to Lourdes with her serious, much older caretaker and is assigned a young, vivacious volunteer named Maria.
While Maria and other young women flirt with the able-bodied men, Christine is simply an onlooker who might as well be invisible.
We follow her through the pilgrim paces at Lourdes -- group meals, Mass, prayers, confession, along with the much-anticipated visits to the grotto where Mary appeared and to the baths where the water is provided by a spring credited with the first miraculous healing.
Always, there are questions, observations and even dark jokes about healing.
When a priest is pressed on the subject, he says, "I believe, of course, that God can perform miracles. But only if we open our hearts fully to His grace. ... Firstly our souls must be healed. Only then can the body be healed."
When a miracle seems to happen to one in the group, the emotions are human and divine as people are envious, disappointed, excluded, skeptical, encouraged or joyful at what's happened. Is the "cure" real and will it last?
In researching miracles, Ms. Hausner found cases of people who seemed to be healed but relapsed. "A miracle exists in my film; something 'miraculous' occurs, but afterward it becomes rather banal. Thus one realizes that this 'miracle' doesn't contain a moral or a meaning ... that it's perhaps only a coincidence," she says in the press notes.
"Lourdes" is not intended as religious inspiration -- the character healed is not of particularly strong faith and Ms. Hausner talks of a capricious, incomprehensible God -- but provides a fascinating look at the enormous enterprise that started with a single apparition.
That is part of its appeal; any mental picture of a small grotto is dispelled once you see the actual locations and crowds who blend in with the actors.
Hope burns as brightly as the two-foot tall candles at Lourdes but as actress Testud has observed: "There's no justice in 'Lourdes.' It's like life often is -- people who don't drink and smoke get sick, a child comes down with a serious illness ... in this regard, the film is altogether just."
Not to mention worth your time, attention and contemplation.
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