LOURDES (2009) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: Jessica Hausner
Sylvie Testud, Léa Seydoux, Bruno Tedeschini,
Elina Löwensohn, Gilette Barbier, Gerhard Liebmann
For those not steeped in Catholic lore and legend, Lourdes is a place in France where the Virgin Mary is said to have made a personal appearance, witnessed by a peasant girl named Bernadette, in 1858. For a long time since then, Lourdes has been a place where crippled, sick, paralyzed and otherwise debilitated pilgrims go to pray to the Virgin for relief from their afflictions. If the way it's depicted in this quiet, meditative movie is accurate, Lourdes isn't just about faith and healing. It's a whole tourist industry that makes the Dickeyville Grotto look like, well, the Dickeyville Grotto. (You don't know about the Dickeyville Grotto? Then never mind.) One of those who comes to Lourdes is a young woman in a wheelchair, a paraplegic named Christine, played with beatific stillness by Sylvie Testud. She admits she goes on these religious excursions not so much because she believes, but to escape her confined existence. (She prefers cultural outings to religious ones.) To reveal what happens to Christine at Lourdes would reveal too much, but the movie tracks her stay there with restraint and a documentary-like detachment that both acknowledges and transcends the kitsch that surrounds her. The rationalizations the tour group leaders provide for God's role in all this seem pretty hollow. Testud's performance is anything but.
