Review by Robert Barry
Stars Sylvie Testud, Léa Seydoux, Gilette Barbier, Gerhard Liebman, Bruno Todeschini, Elina Löwensohn, Katharina Flicker, Linde Prelog, Heidi Baratta, Jacky Pratoussy, Walter Benn
Written by Jessica Hausner
Certification UK U
Runtime 96 minutes
Directed by Jessica Hausner
Interviewed for Screenjabber, actress Sylvie Testud revealed that she was initially concerned by the title of her new film Lourdes - would it be an attack on religion? Would it be a celebration of it? In the end, the film is neither, or at least not unambigiously so. The film acts as a kind of Rorshach test, separating the pious form the profane by their respective interpretations of the film's end and the moments which elicit a laugh. Watching it in a cinema, one could count the chuckles directed at its subtle irreverences and use the results as a sort of straw poll on contemporary belief.
Just as ambiguous is Testud's character, Christine, the impassive pilgrim, paralysed and wheelchair-bound by multiple sclerosis, who claims she only made the trip for the sake of getting out of the house. Testud plays the part as a sort of wide-eyed lost innocent, smart and amiable yet oddly child-like. Wee see her first in profile, before she turns almost straight at us, and smiles. This effect if both welcoming and warming, if slightly disconcerting. There is a distance to her stare that speaks of years of accumulated pain and forbearance.
Director Jessica Hausner started out as a script superviser on Michael Haneke's Funny Games, and Lourdes shares some of Haneke's coldly restrained style, if none of his brutality. Like Haneke, Hausner has a fondness for long, still takes with sparse dialogue<, for holding an exposed strip light up to bourgeois hypocrisy and petty cruelties, more than anything, perhaps, for the extended silences ofthe early Haneke - here punctuated only occasionally by Bach and Schubert. There is extensive use of jump cuts, and of action obscured by foreground objects. The sense of humour, though, and the way its few bits of pop music are handled, is much closer to the gentle absurdism of Belgian film, Aaltra.
In the end, this is less a film about faith or faithlessness, but about a life lived on the sidelines, the feeling of loneliness that comes in the eye of the crowd. But whether you are religious or not, it is hard to come away from this film without the sense of being lifted by it. Now more than ever, it is refreshing to see a film dealing with theological issues without banging a drum for extremists on either side. The only characters the film might be said to condemn are those who sneer cynically at the ecclesiastical proceedings and miraculous claims but take dutifully part nonetheless. As such, the film could just as well be set in a shopping centre as a holy shrine, and perhaps in the end there is less of a difference than we might hope.