Miraculous film in Corrie
On *Sunday 10th April, Corrie Film Club* (please note change of date) shows Jessica Hausner’s extraordinary film, Lourdes. Everyone knows of the constant pilgrimages to the shrine in this French town, which attracts a stream of suffering and disabled people in hopes of miraculous cure, but this film goes further. It accepts that there must be cynicism and a touch of the grotesque about an institution that mingles faith with commercial opportunism, but beyond its documentary exploration of the people in this particular tour group, organised by the Order of Malta, it puts a shrewd finger on something altogether darker.
Sylvie Testud gives an astonishing performance as Christine, an intelligent young Frenchwoman who has multiple sclerosis. Her arms and legs are immobile and her hands are clenched fists, but she watches her companions with an elegant, humane detachment that lifts the film far beyond voyeurism. In the fervour of need, what seems to be a genuinely miraculous event occurs – yet at the same time there is a terrible suspicion that some other agency is at work. All things become possible as the tension mounts, but at the same time a kind of black comedy develops between the people in the group. If there really is divine grace at work, is it taking spiritual strength from one person and visiting it upon another? Jealousy and suspicion are rife, and the boutique background of religious trinkets for sale in every shop heightens the tragi-comedy that is unfolding.
Jessica Hausner, the Austrian director who has made her name as a shrewd commentator on the cruelties that can lie below the conventions of gemütlich European middle-class life, controls the conflicting forms of mystery with adroit skill. Peter Bradshaw said in his Guardian review, ‘As the action of this outstanding movie proceeds, you get the eerie feeling that everything on screen has been invisibly deluged with something very important.’
Visually, the film is intriguing, for Hausner uses a curiously detached technique in which the telling action may happen, not in the conventional foreground, but somewhere in the middle distance of one of her elegantly structured group compositions. You may be either inspired or exasperated by the film’s closing moments, but they are, as Bradshaw put it, ‘a final flourish of Hausner’s sheer, exhilarating technique and intelligence, like that of a superb musician.’ Lourdes is her best film yet – certainly not to be missed.
The showing starts at 8.00 pm and is free. The Corrie Hall would be grateful if non-members of the Film Club could make a small donation.
See the 2-minute trailer of Lourds on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7Ec64c3T2I
