Directed by Jessica Hausner
At Film Forum Feb. 17-Mar. 2
Runtime: 96 min.
DIRECT FROM THE Sundance Film Festival—a pilgrimage for trendspotters, where hipster pretenses are sacred and a distribution deal is the miracle everyone covets—comes Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes. It’s a religious satire focused on Christine (Sylvie Testud), a wheelchair-bound woman suffering multiple sclerosis, one of the several million people who annually journey to Lourdes seeking miracle healing.
Christine is not a believer, neither is Hausner.The entire procession takes place with an air of skepticism: Christine’s resentment and Hausner’s disdain.The wide, long shot compositions convey the emotional distance and detachment that cripples both protagonist and filmmaker. Reducing pilgrimage to routine and form, Hausner’s images imitate Tati and Roy Andersson yet are never droll. Humor might successfully convey the helpers’ and pilgrims’ yearning and folly but Hausner’s schematic approach to debunking religion is predictable and unfunny. Card-playing priests telling sacrilegious jokes (“Is God good or all powerful?”) and nuns dancing at a mixer are no better than Jesuit schoolboy irreverence.
The Sundance shrine would never admit a film like Kirk Cameron’s evangelical Fireproof, yet it welcomes Hausner’s skepticism. Lourdes is considered art precisely because it fashionably does not pursue philosophical understanding.
(“Miracles are fundamentally unjust,” Hausner insists in the press kit.) Her cynical plot—convening seekers, guides and their petty jealousies—resembles Tennessee Williams’ Night of the Iguana, which kind of charted a pilgrimage; however, without exploiting religion, it pinpointed its characters’ spiritual struggles. Hausner’s approach to religion evinces ideological confusion. Hausner’s deadpan derision preaches to a choir of scoffers—in between their ski lifts and Entertainment Weekly photo sessions.
Cinematographer Martin Gschlacht, who gave Gotz Spielmann’s Revanche its metaphysical tone, provides a hard, almost analytical look—even of Lourdes’ natural exteriors. Hausner merely comments on how people conform to religion without getting close to nature or passion. Lourdes buries the anguish of disbelief in sarcasm: shallow philosophizing. Snarky metaphysics.
