Jessica Hausner (2009)
For a fair part of this film, I wondered why the Austrian writer-director Jessica Hausner hadn’t simply made a documentary about pilgrims and other personnel at Lourdes. She presents the gloomily circumscribed routines and rituals with a fascinated and infectious detachment. Then a brain-damaged teenage girl appears to be cured; not many screen minutes later, the main character, Christine, whose multiple sclerosis has rendered her quadriplegic, rises from her bed in the middle of the night. We spend the rest of the picture watching her and the other pilgrims react to this amazing event. Hausner shot the piece on location at Lourdes and I assume that the people we see are a mixture of actors and actual visitors – there’s a huge candlelit procession, for example, which must be the real thing rather than staged for the camera. The events of the film concern the members of a particular group of visitors, some of them able-bodied religious tourists, others seeking a cure for themselves or others. Peter Bradshaw’s admiring Guardian review wonders whether ‘some sort of strange quantum of health and sickness is in force. If physical strength should suddenly desert one of the party, it might migrate to someone else’. That’s a reasonable reading of what appears to be happening in Lourdes but it’s less than clear what Jessica Hausner has in mind. She eventually enlarges the documentary treatment by exploring the implications of what happens when a ‘miracle’ occurs. But Lourdes, with its scrupulous objectivity and artfully attenuated characters, still ends up feeling more like a coded thesis than a drama.
For the most part, Hausner cleverly – that is, to her own advantage – blurs the distinction between sustaining ambiguity-verging-on-mystery and evading explanation. There are occasions, though, when the evasion is a little obvious. When the distressed, contorted face of the young teenager in the wheelchair (Orsolya Toth) is transformed into a smiling, sentient one, her mother (Petra Morze) exclaims joyfully and the other pilgrims – always on the lookout for a miracle – start asking each other if one has occurred. Hausner cuts away quickly and the next time we see the teenager she’s reverted to the way she was before: the lack of any explanation for her changes in condition is glaring. On the day that Christine (Sylvie Testud) recovers the use of her limbs, the priest Pater Nigl (Gerhard Liebmann) takes her to the medical office so that the cure can be verified. One of the staff there explains that Christine’s MS takes a form which includes periods of intensification and periods of remission and predicts that she’ll revert to being paralysed – but neither doctor asks Christine if she’s experienced a similar extent of remission previously, and Hausner is careful not to give Christine the opportunity to comment on her return to health.
The film’s ending is more cunningly opaque. At the party for the pilgrims which completes their stay at Lourdes, Christine dances with Kuno (Bruno Todeschini), the uniformed volunteer she’s liked the look of from the start. She stumbles and falls, and the others watch in fascination, fearing – or, in some cases, hoping for – a relapse. Christine stands up again and moves to the back of the hall as Mrs Hartl (Gilette Barbier), her self-appointed carer during the stay, comes to her side, with Christine’s wheelchair. As Kuno excuses himself, Mrs Hartl, who evidently sees no future for herself if Christine is cured, mutely and obstinately offers the wheelchair. Christine says she doesn’t need it but a few moments later takes her seat in it and the film ends. Is Christine beginning to regress towards paralysis or is she starting to doubt whether she fancies living in the non-disabled world? (We might even wonder if Christine’s illness was a sham – a way of keeping her distance from life – although that seems improbable when her illness has been diagnosed as MS rather than as something indefinitely psychosomatic.)
Lourdes is economically witty and incisive in showing how the place works and suggesting what some of the people we’re watching have in mind. We immediately get a sense that Christine may not be here for purely thaumaturgy-seeking reasons. She and Kuno have met before, on a pilgrimage to Rome: she explains that this kind of holiday is the best way for someone wheelchair-bound to go places; they both agree that Lourdes is culturally an anti-climax after Rome. Mr Hruby (Walter Benn), a sixtyish paraplegic, watches Christine’s transformation – on the face of it expressionlessly yet we can see him sinking into ever deeper and more sullen envy. Two late middle-aged, able-bodied Catholic women on the tour party (Heidi Baratta and Linda Prelog) function as a kind of mini-Greek chorus. One is plump and affably soft-headed, the other leaner and unsmiling: we first see her looking down distastefully at Mrs Hartl, who’s on her knees before a statue of the Virgin – as if this kind of religious demonstrativeness is not only OTT but, worse, clutters up the corridor. When Christine becomes mobile, the two women offer congratulations before they start querying why she should have been the recipient of divine grace – since she ‘doesn’t seem very pious’. After Christine’s stumble on the dance floor, the smiley, sentimental one of the pair says how terrible it would be if this were a relapse, and wonders aloud what that would say about God’s authority. Her astringent companion simply explains that, if it’s a relapse, ‘It won’t be a true miracle’. When the fat one pursues the argument – ‘If God’s not in charge, who is?’ – the thin one raises a different subject for discussion: ‘I wonder if we’re going to get a dessert’.
The podgy, unprepossessing Pater Nigl is stubbornly intelligent. When Christine goes to confession, she tells him how she resents her debilitating illness. He asks if she assumes that someone able to walk is necessarily happier, and explains that every human life is unique and God-given. He enjoins Christine to pray for her soul to be cured ‘and, if God wishes, your body may be cured too’. This seems to make a crucial point about the Catholic Church’s view of pilgrims to present-day Lourdes: the implication is not only that bodily affliction is secondary but that, if these people weren’t spiritually sick, they wouldn’t bother coming to Lourdes for relief at all. Pater Nigl is wary, uneasy about the apparent act of God. We see it in his reaction when his colleague asks Christine if her physical restoration has been accompanied by a sense of inner illumination. She admits ‘not really’ and asks worriedly if that ‘makes a difference’. At the social event which concludes the film, Pater Nigl calls Christine to the stage and barely offers her a helping hand, as if he wants to see how strong the miracle is.
Two of the nurses register strongly and contrastingly. A pretty young volunteer (Léa Seydoux), assigned to Christine, is soon more interested in one of the male volunteers and talks about coming back in the winter for skiing (Lourdes is in the Pyrenees). This girl’s normal, worldly appetite is a welcome change from the mournful, clinical atmosphere of the place – and the boy she likes pairs up with her well. It’s one of the few pleasurable moments in Lourdes to see them dancing together and hear her karaoke efforts at the closing party. Elina Lowensohn is excellent as the senior nurse, Cécile – shushing the dining room with increasing insistence, wearing a professional, mirthless smile as she tells the pilgrims about what’s next on the agenda. (‘This morning you have some free time. You can either take the healing waters or go to confession.’) When the teenage girl in the wheelchair appears to be cured, Cécile is unsmiling and you wonder if she dislikes the idea of a miracle occurring because it might upset her authority. It’s a bit too pat, and less interesting, that Cécile is then revealed herself to be seriously ill. All the actors are good yet, except for Sylvie Testud and Bruno Todeschini, the people they’re playing don’t amount to much more than expressions of various points of view. Not the least impressive part of the performances of Testud and Todeschini is that their characters aren’t easily readable but leave you in no doubt there’s more to them than meets the eye (this suits Hausner’s purposes perfectly). Testud’s Christine – childlike yet quietly calculating, often wearing a red hat which gets to look like a comic emblem of her being singled out by God – is the embodiment of the film’s slipperiness. Todeschini has a strong quality of sensual reserve – Kuno wears his uniform like a skin of propriety.
In a way I wish this had been a documentary because I’d have liked to glean more facts about Lourdes: how often a typical tour party stays for; the relative numbers of paid and volunteer staff, and how regularly the latter return; how often wonderful cures appear to have occurred (when Christine and the priest go to the medical office the receptionist tells them they’re not the first that day and the doctor calls ‘Next, please’); what proportion of thaumaturgical happenings proves too short-lived to pass the miracle test. Lourdes is frustrating in this respect as well as at an artistic level. But Jessica Hausner is clearly a talented filmmaker and she has a welcome light touch in showing the commercial, touristic side of Lourdes: it’s plain enough to see – she doesn’t push it as a satirical point. When Christine speaks into the microphone at the concluding party, she starts thanking people and God. It sounds like an acceptance speech and so it proves to be: she’s presented with an award for ‘pilgrim of the year’.
5 April 2010
