For days I kept asking myself what didn't quite sit right about the documentary Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai made at Lourdes. I also wondered how much my reaction had to do with more than twenty years of familiarity with this place—and a kind of jealousy at seeing a world filmed that, even though I know it belongs to everyone, feels too much like mine. It's like hearing a cover of your favorite song. Part of you likes it. But part of you thinks something's just not in the right place.
The humanity that comes to Lourdes is exactly as Demaizière and Teurlai show it. In the stories of their subjects I recognized and relived so many stories and faces I've had the gift of touching: the rupture of a car accident, the sentence of a death foretold, the mystery of innocent suffering, the absolute contempt for life that drives people to suicide, the fragile tenderness of age, the violated carefreeness of youth, the selling of one's body and the contradictory search for one's soul, service to the sick, the disciplined military pilgrimages and the loud, vivid invasions of Roma families.
That's exactly how Lourdes is: everything and its opposite coexist there. I give the directors top marks for an anthropological inquiry into the two great mysteries of human life—love and suffering—which they managed to weave together without judgment, using different cinematic registers, tailoring a perfect fit for each story, employing the poetic nobility of cinema while handling souls with care. The only flaw: they diminished too much the sacredness of the place. Those spaces might have been allowed to speak more, instead of being confined to the narrow language of documentary form.
That aftertaste I felt as bitter at first but then found sweeter by the end—especially in the scenes at the pools—was the account of Lourdes in its physicality and its light. My Lourdes, in that unique mixture of water, earth, air, and fire. Where God and man met in flesh, in Mary's appearances to Bernadette, the physical places inevitably have much to say.
The Lourdes of Demaizière and Teurlai is the Lourdes of man seeking God—hence the camera's almost obsessive lingering on hands touching the grotto, on the Stations of the Cross, on processions, on bodies being tended. But I believe the true Lourdes is God seeking man, calling to him in a mother's voice from a grotto. A wise Roma man says midway through the film: "Lourdes feels good because it's like going home to your mother, and at your mother's house everyone is well." Your mother's house at Lourdes is a grotto that in 1858, when Mary appeared to Bernadette—an illiterate, poor girl—was a kind of open-air dump. As if today Mary appeared to a Roma child at a garbage heap.
Mary asked Bernadette to dig with her hands in the mud, to soil her face with that clay, and to keep digging until clear water began to flow from the filth—water to drink, water to wash her face and hands. As if Mary were asking that Roma child to dig under the refuse of that heap to make miraculous water spring forth.
In that grotto where millions of pilgrims now pass, Mary appeared in a cavity shaped like a womb: that image we've seen millions of times on postcards, the one everyone visually connects to Lourdes—the statue of the Virgin made according to Bernadette's own description—never appears in Demaizière and Teurlai's film. Surely not by chance. I would have wanted more of the celestial grotto, more water flowing, more sky glowing with colors sometimes luminous, sometimes threatening. Along with the credit I give the French directors for stripping Lourdes of all that rhetorical baggage—the arguments for and against we've heard countless times—I would have strongly wanted them to find a way to tell my Lourdes too: the mystery of God calling to man without ever tiring, even when man needs to celebrate Him through material works, like the sanctuary built over the grotto and all the works that have rationalized spaces for prayer, for candles, for water and pools.
Still, I invite everyone—whether you've been there, will go, or hate pilgrimages—to see Lourdes in the cinema. Don't be intimidated by the crowd. It's not a crush that oppresses. It's a people in motion, a puzzle where you are an irreplaceable piece. Whoever you are.