THERESE (Alain Cavalier, 1986)

Like Tennyson’s “The Holy Grail,” Thérèse studies the religious impulse as sublimated sexuality—or, for one of the cloistered Carmelites, a socially accepted retreat from the “ugly [world] outside.” Alain Cavalier’s brilliant film marshals Rembrandt lighting and earth-tones for its portrait of Thérèse Martin, who was canonized as St. Thérèse of Lisieux in 1925, less that thirty years after her tubercular death. When she marries Jesus, the girl speaks proudly of her unworthiness, and it is just this sort of contradiction that renders her personality complex throughout. When she is waning, she remarks: “I see nothing after this life. A wall rising to the stars.” Shortly after, she decides that her doubt is Jesus’s own devious doing. “He is most handsome when he hides.”
     The film’s centerpiece is the Christmas celebration inside the convent. Exchanging small gifts on their “husband-child’s birthday,” the sisters hug and kiss each other while taking turns cradling in their arms a clay baby Jesus; the sound of an actual baby’s cries underscores the delusional nature of the event. A gift of champagne leads to singing, swaying, dancing—a mellow group ecstasy. Cavalier emphasizes the sisterliness of the sisterhood (Martin’s own sister is another member of the cloister)—a state that includes whispers, bonds, intrigues, little conspiracies, jealousy. Cavalier’s minimalist shots sometimes show nuns in groups of two or three; a good many shots consist of closeups of hands, such as at labor or of one soul’s hand wrapped inside another’s.
     “I love wide-open spaces,” Thérèse writes in her diary. “But is there pure love in my heart?”
     Who can say such love exists? Encapsulating the ambiguity is the closing shot: following her death, Thérèse’s cloth slippers, touching one another, on the floor by her bed—material scraps of an unfathomable life.