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Lourdes

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Lourdes: between medicine and the Madonna

Elfin charmer: Sylvie Testud as the wheelchair-bound Christine

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.

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