Jessica Hausner`s Comments:
Lourdes is a (cruel) fairy-tale, a day-dream or a nightmare. Ill people of the entire world go to Lourdes hoping to get their health back, hoping for a miracle, because Lourdes is a place where the existence of miracles is still asserted, a place synonymous of hope, comfort and recovery for the desperate and the dying. But the ways of God are unfathomable, and the hope that on the verge of death, everything may turn out alright is one that seems absurd when life is drawing to an end. Lourdes is the stage on which this human comedy plays out.
LOURDES, AMBIVALENCE AND ABSURDITY
From one perspective, the film Lourdes shows faith in a benevolent and eternal God, while from another it depicts a reality characterized by the arbitrary and the ephemeral. Lourdes is a cruel story – a dream or a nightmare. Sick and dying people from the entire world travel to Lourdes to recover their health. They’re hoping for a miracle because it’s precisely at Lourdes that such things still happen.
It’s unfortunate that God is so capricious, that He gives and takes back according to his whims and that his ways remain incomprehensible. Lourdes is a place where one affirms the existence of miracles, a place synonymous with hope, comfort and healing for the dying and the desperate. However, the hope that on the brink of death everything will turn out alright seems absurd. Lourdes is the stage on which this human comedy plays out: the pursuit of well-being and fulfillment that drives every human being is met with incompletion and the arbitrary. Paralytics dream of being able to walk, the lonely long for friends, the hungry hope to be fed… At Lourdes these sentiments are catholic, but they exist elsewhere as well: the feeling that life has been truncated and the longing for fulfillment are universal sentiments.
‘In a certain way, everyone is stuck in wheelchair’.
quoted by Father Nigl
HAPPINESS, HOPE AND THE EPHEMERAL
The miracle that occurs in Lourdes brings a period of happiness for Christine, an improvement, but ultimately not salvation. The promise of salvation offered by the church will have to be postponed until later.
‘Most people only receive their pardon after death’
quoted by Cécile
That’s the consolation given to those who return without being healed or to those who relapse: the hereafter. The desire to be healed is a desire to attain happiness and to hold onto it: to live an accomplished, complete and happy life that has meaning. When she recovers, Christine too hopes to take up her studies again, to start a family and learn to play the piano. But happiness is ephemeral: it comes and goes, without having any particular significance.
SOMEONE IS GOING TO BE SAVED?
But why him and not me?
A miraculous healing is unjust. Why is one person healed and not another? What can one do to be healed? Pray, like the mother of the apathetic girl; choose humility, like Cécile; or on the contrary, do nothing, like Christine?
There is no answer to this question. Miracles lean towards the arbitrary, they occur without logic or reason. While miracles are fundamentally unjust, they’re nevertheless an absolute delight for the person healed.
A person who has presumably been miraculously cured has no guarantee, however, that the cure will last. The healing offers a new opportunity for Christine – she would like to enjoy life – but she understands that her newfound happiness could come to an end at any moment. She thus starts to search for a meaning, to ask herself if she must do something in particular to prove herself worthy of her recovery.
What can she do to make the miracle last? Does God hear her prayers?
