Lourdes

Lourdes (By the Austrian filmmaker Jesica Hausner) is a cracking find of a film as it challenges and provokes rather than simply presenting an interesting story.
The film opens with a shot of a utilitarian and empty hotel restaurant. Slowly the large cast enter to take their seats. Some are clearly disabled, some are in wheelchairs and their attendants are made up of nuns and volunteer nurses who wear almost fascist type uniforms.
This first shot is a pivotal one, as it underlines the tone of the entire film. Hausner, takes an unhurried view of the group of pilgrims and their carers on a trip to Lourdes and does so with some beautifully crafted wide group shots of ceremony and ritual. She explains very little, yet gives her motley group a complicated religious ambiguity that covers pious hope, depressive apathy, and more interestingly observes acts of petty jealously, bitchiness,bitterness and periods of cynicism amongst the group when one of them seemingly has a partial recovery from her disability.
The central character is a young French quadriplegic Christine ( Slyvie Testud) who has come on the pilgrimage as a way of getting to socialise. She observes everything with a benign interest and although physically passive to the whims of the inexperienced teenage carers she survives the experience with a resignation and stillness which is, at times amazingly powerful to watch.

The film does not sneer at faith, or hope or indeed pilgrimage...it observes everything with some wit, with care and with patience and like all good films it asks many more questions than it finally answers
9/10