I saw the 2009 film Lourdes this evening as part of the Wisconsin Film Festival.  Written and directed by the Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner, it takes the viewer inside the pilgrimage to Lourdes, where more than a million people seek healing each year. The film is shot with empathy toward the pilgrims and sensitivity to the theological questions that arise for people seeking healing. Hausner is interested in these questions, and has a variety of characters asking them overtly, and with her camera asks them implicitly. Surprisingly, the church and the clergy come off fairly well. The priest who has to answer everyone’s questions, seems uncomfortable with facile answers, yet tries to find ways of helping the pilgrims understand their plight.

The lead character is Christine, played by Sylvie Testud. She suffers from multiple sclerosis and has come to Lourdes because such pilgrimages are the only way for her to get out of her house. She admits to preferring the cultural offerings of Rome to what Lourdes can provide. Testud is marvelous as the suffering woman who wants to have a “normal” life as she confesses to the priest.

One rarely sees in film images of people taking care of others in such intimate ways. Christine is tended by a volunteer, a young woman who says she’s doing this because she wants to find meaning. She dresses Christine, spoon feeds her, and pushes her wheelchair, but she also goes off and has fun with the young male attendants.One of the lingering, unspoken questions concerns the motives of all of those who take care of the pilgrims.

As I watched, I was reminded of Robert Orsi’s discussion of the Catholic cult of suffering that emerged in the mid-twentieth century (in Between Heaven and Earth) and indeed one of the characters mouths platitudes to the invalids about their role as model sufferers. There are also almost continuous shots of religious gift shops, but they serve as a backdrop to the action; there’s no attempt, explicit or implicit, to comment on the commercialism.

Suffering and the quest for miracles can bring out the worst in religion, and in movies. It’s easy either to give an easy answer to the difficult questions of why suffering happens, and why one person receives a “miracle” while others don’t. The quest for healing also attracts all matter of charlatans.

The movie asks great questions and ends in ambiguity. If you’re in Madison, there’s another showing tomorrow night; otherwise, add it to your Netflix queue.