Faith as a commodity. In the town of Lourdes, a micro-industry of hotels catering to millions of tourists a year and shops selling souvenir guidebooks and plastic statuettes of the Virgin Mary has emerged in the wake of reported Marian apparitions dating back to the mid 19th Century, notable for their healing properties. A church was built on the site, then several more, and now Lourdes is one of the largest places of religious tourism in the world. People travel from far and wide for the chance to experience a miracle. In Jessica Hausner’s film, one of these pilgrims is Christine, a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis and bound to a wheelchair, who has travelled here with a group of others similarly hoping for a healing miracle. Once at their hotel, the pilgrims are each assigned a nun to look after them and are asked to abide by a strict itinerary of visits to several parts of the site: a healing bath, a church service, a torchlit procession. Christine isn’t a particularly strong believer, but is on the trip as it’s “the only way to get out” of her day-to-day life. There are others who are deeply religious, while some are simply desperate for a miracle: not for them, necessarily, but for their loved ones. At least one of the pilgrims has taken her disabled daughter to Lourdes several times.
Miracles are, by their nature, few and far between, so a rivalry of sorts emerges between the members of this group. Hausner has always been a director of cliques and of lowkey bullying. Lovely Rita, her first film, follows a young girl, an only child, ostracised both at school and at home and surrounded by hostility rather than love. In Hotel, a woman starts a job at a secluded hotel in the Austrian countryside, away from her family and friends, and struggles to fit in with her new colleagues. In Lourdes, everyone in the group is hoping for a miracle, but it has to be their miracle. What’s the point, otherwise? And it ends up as being, perhaps inevitably, Christine’s miracle. She’s simultaneously the least deserving of such a thing, and the most. Not overtly religious but uneasy with how touristy the experience of Lourdes is. Not so desperate for a cure as some but willing to follow the same processes that everyone else adheres to so emotionally. As fellow pilgrims spread gossip, nuns sneak around after dark with guards and priests tell blasphemous jokes about the pointlessness of this pilgrimage, Christine’s respect for Lourdes never wavers. But she’s not the only one, so, when she suddenly steps out of her wheelchair and walks down to breakfast one morning, people talk. Why her?
Her new condition brings with it new confidence, and her crush on one of the guards is now something she sees as attainable. They spend more time together, and share a kiss in the mountains while on a hike for only the most able-bodied of the pilgrims. The beautiful young nun assigned to her, however, also has eyes on the same guard, and now sees Christine, a woman who she used to bathe and feed, as a romantic threat, and tries in vain to stop her from joining the group on the mountain. Later, Christine tells two of the women in the group that “I have the feeling that great things are in store for me” as they turn away from her and roll their eyes. All of these people, each praying for a miracle, shift from hope and faith to jealousy and scepticism at breakneck speed, the selfishness of their prayers exposed in their behaviour once the idea of a miracle becomes unattainable to them as individuals and as a group. They wait for any moments of weakness to emerge, signs that this miracle is, like many others, only temporary. At the dinner party that concludes the trip, Christine dances alone with the guard and suddenly collapses, before recovering again. As she rests in the corner, a murmur spreads and the party suddenly springs into life. For Hausner, people can only be happy when everyone in the room is as broken or as weak as they all are.