Movie of the Week

Thérèse is a film about the life of Saint Thérèse de Lisieux. It was first released in 1986 and directed by Alain Cavalier. It won the 1987 César Awards for Best Film, Best Writing, and Best Editing. The film also won the Jury Prize at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. Catherine Mouchet won the César Award for Most Promising Actress for 1987 for her performance. Like her older sisters before her, Thérèse Martin is determined to become a Carmelite nun even though she is officially too young to enter the order. Thérèse’s stubborn piety wins through, and her love affair with Jesus transfigures her short life. Alain Cavalier‘s account of Thérèse’s joy in her vocation is based on her spiritual autobiography , The Story of a Soul. The film was first shown on British television in 1987 on a nun-themed film evening, with Black Narcissus, and was introduced by Marina Warner. ‘I think Thérèse is a rare and beautiful film… no film has ever before transmitted so involvingly the bliss the mystics describe of communion with God, the intense pleasure a saint like Thérèse felt at her intimacy with Jesus, the deprivation she experienced when he seemed to be absent and the comfort and affection of young women sequestered together… Cavalier’s visual style, the film’s restrained spectrum, its dove greys, bistres, waxy whites, recall the quiet images Gwen John painted in Normandy of nuns reading, praying… Cavalier scans the properties of convent life… He has learned from Robert Bresson how to linger on an image, how to give symbolic intensity to humdrum objects, by isolating them in the frame, and gentle repetition.”

(From Wikipedia)