Fatima in the frame; a hotly contested miracle

The children who claimed to see a vision of the Virgin Mary outside their village are the focus of Marco Pontecorvo’s film.

Alejandra Howard stars in Fatima, an uplifting story about the power of faith. Picture: Claudio Iannone

Fatima (M)
Limited release
★★★

I believe that the last time a film was made about the events that took place in the Portugal village of Fatima during World War I, was in 1952. John Brahm’s The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, produced during the Cold War and the era of McCarthyism, specifically compared the Socialist government in power in Portugal in 1917 with the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe at the time the film was made.

Fatima, a new film about those events, while it is somewhat more measured, still points a finger at the “anticlerical” government in power in Portugal at a time when the country’s soldiers were fighting on the side of the British in the Great War.

Fatima is directed by Marco Pontecorvo, the son of Gillo Pontecorvo, who directed one of the major political films of the 60s, The Battle of Algiers (1966). The screenplay the director co-authored with Valerio D’Annunzio and Barbara Nicolosi, is divided between two time periods.

In 1989, in the town of Coimbra, Nichols (Harvey Keitel), a professor of history, receives permission to interview Sister Lucia (Sonia Braga), an elderly nun, for a book he is writing. As a child in 1917, in scenes that comprise the bulk of the film, Lucia (Stephanie Gil), then aged 10, was one of the children who claimed to see a vision of the Virgin Mary (Joana Ribeiro), who appeared to them just outside the village on the same day (the 13th) every month.

As news of the visitations spread, people in increasing numbers flocked to the place on the date in question, but only the children saw, and heard, the vision.

The apparent miracle was hotly disputed by Arturo (Goran Visnjic), the town’s socialist mayor, who eventually took the extreme measure of locking the doors of the church, to the dismay of Father Ferreira (Joaquim de Almeida). But the children, Lucia, Jacinta (Alejandra Howard) and Francisco (Jorge Lamelas), remained steadfast in insisting that they saw and heard the Virgin Mary.

Harvey Keitel in a scene from Fatima. Picture: Armanda Claro

It goes without saying that films about religion are very much a matter of personal taste and belief. Back in 1943 Henry King’s The Song of Bernadette, about the young French girl who had similar visions in 1858 at Lourdes, won four Oscars — including Best Actress for Jennifer Jones — and was a major box-office success. Times have changed, and Fatima, for all its sincerity and fine production values, is likely to appeal mainly to Catholic audiences.

In the “modern” sequences, the worldly professor quizzes Sister Lucia on the details of the miracle, to which the aged nun replies that she doesn’t have all the answers (the casting of Braga in this role is interesting in that she made her reputation in extremely raunchy Brazilian films like Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands in 1976).

Pontecorvo is better known as a cinematographer than as a director, and the film is visually rich. Unfortunately the decision to release it in English (or, rather, American) means that a cast of mainly Portuguese actors has had to be dubbed, with mixed results. The credit titles hold a few surprises, such as the presence of a “Virgin Mary foot double”.

The film ends with a soaring rendition of Andrea Bocelli’s Gloria, and should provide solace and inspiration to believers.

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Adam (PG)
Limited release from Thursday
★★★★

Adam is a Moroccan film set in Casablanca, the real Casablanca not the Hollywood studio setting where Humphrey Bogart brooded over Ingrid Bergman. The streets of Casablanca’s Old Town are narrow and crowded; perfume sellers ply their trade and wandering musicians entertain.

This is where Abla (Lubna Azabel) operates a small bakery from her front room, selling bread from the window overlooking the street. She is a widow and she has an eight-year-old daughter, Warda (Douae Belkhaouda), named after the popular Algerian entertainer Warda Al-Jazairia, who was her late husband’s favourite songstress.

Abla is a bitter woman; her husband, who had worked at the city’s port, was killed in an accident. “He was buried when he was still warm,” she laments. She is having trouble getting over her loss.

Samia (Nisrin Erradi) comes from a village and she’s in trouble. Pregnant and homeless she has come to the city to give birth to her baby away from friends and family. Her intention is to give the child away for adoption and return home without telling anyone about her disgrace, but she needs work and she needs shelter, and both are in short supply for a girl in her condition.

Abla is one of several people in the Old Town who turn Samia away, but when she sees the young woman settling down to sleep on the street she takes pity on her. She offers her shelter for a strictly limited period of time and refuses the grateful girl’s offers of help.

But Samia is determined to repay her benefactor in the only way she knows how; in the village she was taught how to bake msemen and rziza, and she persuades Abla to allow her to offer these to her customers.

The delicacies soon become popular and Samia is allowed to stay, to the delight of Warda, who loves the company of the young mother-to-be.

If at the outset you were slightly puzzled why a film about two women — three if you count Warda — is named after the world’s first man, you won’t wonder for long. The story that writer-director Maryam Touzani is telling here is not one based on surprising plot developments; you can predict where it’s going. But that doesn’t make it any less enchanting. It’s Touzani’s first feature after some short films, and her direction of the talented actors is very assured.

The two women, one from the city, the other from the country, actually share a number of attributes. Both are coming to terms with an unexpected disaster; for Abla it’s the loss of her husband, and for Samia it’s the unwanted pregnancy.

Abla becomes angry when Samia, thinking to please her, plays a tape of songs by Warda, not realising the bitter memories the music brings with it. Abla also rejects the attentions of Slimani (Aziz Hattab), the man who delivers the bakery ingredients.

Samia is determined that when it’s born, her baby will have a future, but that means relinquishing him and, as Abla points out, afterwards there’s no going back. “I don’t want him to be a piece of filth, an outcast all his life,” responds Samia. “With me he’s doomed.”

One of the key exchanges between the women comes when Abla opens up to Samia about the death of her husband and how she was given no opportunity to grieve, denied even the possibility of seeing his body.

“Death does not belong to women,” she sighs, resignedly, to which Samia responds: “Few things really belong to us.”

Though these dialogue scenes provide much of the drama, Touzani is not afraid to simply observe the women when they are silent. In quite a few scenes the camera simply lingers on the face of one or other of the women, to telling effect.

The film is dedicated ‘To My Mother’ and it’s a remarkably accomplished debut from a woman working in a paternalistic society. Adam is a small but almost perfect movie that lingers in the memory.