Things are looking up on the Lido. The first week of the festival has already produced more strong and tasty titles than the whole of last year’s slack line-up put together.
But only one competition film so far can aspire to contemporary classic status: Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes.
Set in the eponymous French pilgrimage town, the Austrian director’s film is a calm, intelligent, understated study of the miracle factory and the hopeful pilgrims who flock there in search of the divine cure that human healers have been unable to deliver.
There’s a dowdy institutional beigeness to the film’s interiors; these staid pilgrim hospices and waiting rooms resemble the sad hotels that Communist Eastern Europe used to be so good at.
Into these regulated, polished spaces comes a group of French pilgrims, some of whom have severe physical or mental disabilities. The story (and the camera) soon home in on wheelchair-bound MS sufferer Christine (elfin charmer Sylvie Testud), who seems, as one of the group archly observes, "not as pious as she might be"; she’s a serial pilgrimage tourist who seems to use these subsidised holidays as a way to get out of the house and meet people.
Events develop in a direction that follows the Hollywood script in one sense — it’s no spoiler to reveal that a miracle of sorts takes place. But the unsentimental, wry style in which the film is shot and narrated arms and educates its audience against the easy feelgood ending — while at the same time leaving the door open to the possibility that something wondrous has happened.
Hausner walks a tightrope between hope and realism, between medicine and the Madonna — and the result is an austere, measured, sceptical, sensitive film that lingers in the mind for days as we attempt to tease out its very human complexities.
Lourdes
