Cinema: What She Did for Love THERESE

When Therese Martin died in 1897, she was an unknown nun of 24. She had lived 15 years at home with her father, nine more in the Carmelite cloister at Lisieux, France. She worked no eye-catching miracles, made no famous converts, succumbed to tuberculosis like many others of her time. Yet within 28 years of her death, Pope Pius XI had canonized Therese, and her artless autobiography, The Story of a Soul, had blossomed into one of the world’s best-selling books.

The secret of Therese’s overnight success was simple: she had a genius for loving Jesus. “Passing by me,” she wrote, “Jesus saw that I was ripe for love. He plighted His troth to me and I became His.” No self-denial attended this betrothal, only the deepest and most radiant devotion. Therese was a vibrant teenager, bursting with the juice of sanctity, and in Christ she found the ideal outlet for her holy passion. She reveled in his ascetic good looks, his impossible demands, his gentlemanly reticence. For Therese, God was the perfect man — an amalgam of loving husband, righteous father, adorable son, good-time pal, indefatigable lover — and she made herself the ultimate acolyte, surrendering to her heart’s crush. Throwing over reverence for schoolgirl rapture, Therese dared to love Jesus to pieces.

For God’s sunniest slave, a film of sensuous austerity. Alain Cavalier’s biography plays the incidents in Therese’s life as terse vignettes. The background is a spare, off-white wall. There are no raised voices or unnecessary gestures. Here stark 19th century mysticism meets skeptical 20th century minimalism. But, as Therese did with God, the film serves its subject, rather than imposing an ironic gloss. It communicates a girl’s consuming joy in finding, in Jesus, the object of her obsession. It also takes a peasant’s pleasure in the texture and even the temperature of every icon, from a bed warmer to a crucifix to the face of an old crippled nun preparing to die. “Give me a kiss,” she demands of young Therese. “A real kiss. The kind that warms you up.” The movie is a saint’s chaste kiss that warms you up.

Therese (played with fierce clarity by Catherine Mouchet) was one of four Martin sisters in the convent at Lisieux. The film portrays it as a true community, a beautiful sisterhood. For novices like Therese, every act of abasement is another wondrous rite of initiation into a high-spirited sorority of love and sacrifice. For the older nuns, the convent is not a ^ prison but an enchanted castle that surrounds them with images of their beloved. All the sisters find beauty in duty, fulfillment in filth. One nun, ministering to lepers, consumes flakes of a diseased man’s skin as if it were the Eucharist. Later another nun tastes the dying Therese’s tubercular sputum and makes of it a sacrament of ecstatic commitment. To Cavalier, these acts have a spiritual and physical grace, for they are outward signs of the sisters’ bond. In the purest love — worldly or divine — nothing is impossible, nothing is impure.

Nor is there anything blasphemous in the gossipy intimacies that Therese swaps with her young acolytes about their love for Jesus. “Fondle him,” she advises a friend. “That’s how I snared him.” Therese dies as she lived, a coquette for Christ, gaily fanning the crucifix on her sickbed pillow. “Back together again?” a nun asks of Therese and her beloved. The girl nods: “Poor thing. He’s so lonely.” Her mission was to make everyone feel happier, less lonely. A century later, she does so on film. Therese is enough to restore one’s faith, at least, in the power of movies.