Lourdes

Certainly one of the better films we've seen this year, a fine consideration of miracles, faith, and our favourite subject, people.
This film is wonderfully ambiguos, perhaps in part because it needed the authority's permission to film, and partly because ambiguity is, well, the intelligent artistic position. It is over simplistic to read this as simply mocking the ridicuolousness of the Catholics and the shrine (though it does this at times). What it critiques (in an untterly non-polemical way) is the people who prove inadequate in their understanding, who miss the point. We are not quite sure if Lourdes does have some (very immanenent) kind of miraclulousness, and should be celebrated, or is the home of the phony.
The plotting rachets up the tension, keeping us grinding nails into palms in even the stillest scenes, as the almost unbearable tensions of the tiniest infringements become manifest. The film making is, in a good way, rather cruel and mean spirited towards the audience; in the most understated way possible it puts them through the wringer.
And understated this film in, with lots of long, still shots. These are beautifully choreographed, stunning images, terrifically framed and using colour in original ways. Take the tracking shot over the candles; done with grace and ingenuity to create great spectacle. Jessica Hausner is a fine director. Like the incredible 'In The City Of Sylvia' the camera stays on scenes when the 'action' has left, creating a spectral beauty. This kind of tactic only works when the mis-en-scene is beautiful and intelligently laid out, which is the case here. Marks also for the always-effective trick of placing characters on the sides of shots, so we don't notice them until the end.
Like 'Sylvia', we stay on characters faces/expressions so we are required to do thinking for ourselves, to make realisations for ourselves, that add untold elements of true 'audience interaction' to the film. A film for the intelligent.
The acting is faultless, the character of the mother-superior figure Cecille is a cold study of a masterwork, Madame Carre is unbearably pooignant, an elderly women in the movies who we care about more than just the usually centralised young.
All round, this a slow-moving, intelligent, often cruel (nearly to the point of a black comedy) and wonderful film.