The Miracle Club, electrifying Maggie Smith steals the show

The French shrine where Saint Bernadette experienced the first of her holy visions offers hope for a mother in 1960s set film The Miracle Club, starring the brilliant Maggie Smith.

Laura Linney and Maggie Smith in The Miracle Club

The Miracle Club (PG)

In cinemas from Thursday
★★★½

There’s a delicious scene early in Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s Irish/UK dramedy The Miracle Club. Three women, representing three different generations, are performing at a charity concert in a coastal suburb of Dublin. The year is 1967, and the women are wearing identical, brightly-coloured floral dresses. The youngest of th`e three, Dolly Hennessey (Agnes O’Casey) is the lead singer, and her backup singers are Eileen Dunne (Kathy Bates) and Lily Fox (Maggie Smith). They are singing The Chiffons’ He’s So Fine, and they are electrifying, Maggie Smith especially. I never thought I would see the indefatigable Smith as a backup singer.

Like many small communities, this one has its dark past. Lily regularly visits the beach where a plaque commemorates her 19-year-old son, Declan, who drowned there 40 years earlier. That was the year Chrissie Ahearne (Laura Linney) left for America. She has now returned to Ireland following the death of her mother, but there remains a good deal of resentment towards her in the community.

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Lily still lives with her husband Tommy (Niall Buggy); Eileen is not getting much support from her husband, Frank (Stephen Rea) and her adolescent children, while Dolly is coping with a young family, and with George (Mark McKenna), her preoccupied husband.

Soon after Chrissie’s return, she decides to join most of the other women and children on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Dolly’s older son, Daniel (Eric Smith), has non-verbal autism and she believes that taking him to the French shrine where Saint Bernadette experienced the first of her holy visions in 1858 may cure him.

“We can’t give up on him,” she tells her husband. She feels guilty because she had tried unsuccessfully to abort the foetus. Eileen also has a reason for making the trip; she suspects she has cancer. The other backstories are well worth discovering as the narrative proceeds.

Leaving behind their husbands, who are less than happy about the trip, the group sets out by coach for their destination. The three screenwriters, Jimmy Smallhorne, Timothy Prager and Joshua D. Maurer, are not starry-eyed about the sanctity of the shrine, making pointed commentary about the overcommercialisation of the venerated sanctuary.

Given the pitfalls inherent in the plot, the director and writers succeed in skirting sentimentality with reasonable success. But the film succeeds mainly because of a flawless ensemble, among whom viewers can put their faith in the eternally dependable Smith stealing the movie.

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Alcarras (M)

In cinemas
★★★★

Alcarras is the name of the Catalan village where the Soles family have been harvesting peaches since the Spanish Civil War. This sublime second feature by Carla Simon, which won the Golden Bear at Berlin last year, is a gently unfolding pastorale about the multi-generational family that has worked the orchards for nearly a century. We first meet these hardworking farmers through their youngest members, the innocent six-year-olds who are unaware that monumental changes are about to take place.

Clan patriarch, Rogelio (Josep Abad), had entered into a handshake deal with the owner of the land in the mid-1930s to work the farm, and now his heir, Joaquim Pinyol (Jacob Diarte), wants to end the arrangement so that he can construct a solar farm on the property.

Given reports of the punishingly hot weather Spain has experienced this northern summer, a solar farm certainly seems like a good idea. But it’s establishment would mean the destruction of the decades-old peach trees, something old Soles, his sons, and grandsons and their families, find a horrifying prospect which unifies them throughout their intergenerational frictions.

This is the second feature made by co-writer and director Simon since Summer 1993 (2017), and it’s an almost completely successful follow-up by being as autobiographical as her debut. The cast, composed of non-professional actors from the district, is universally persuasive in their roles, while the outstanding cinematography by Daniela Cajias, mostly shot during the magic hours of dawn and dusk, is a joy to behold. It’s true the film is on the long side, but it exerts a quiet grip on the viewer as we gradually come to realise that this may well be the last summer this succulent fruit will be harvested in Alcarras. In other words, this is another “end of an era” movie, and a very special one at that.

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Sugar and Stars (A la belle etoile) (M)

In cinemas
★★½

Sugar and Stars is a perfectly decent, perfectly straightforward rags-to-riches biopic inspired by the life of a pastry chef.

The film cuts back and forth between the experiences of eight-year-old Yazid Ichemrahan (Marwan Amesker) in 1998 when he is living with a foster mother and stealing food from a supermarket, to 2006, when he, now played by prominent online influencer Riadh Belaiche, talks his way into the cooking school run by a top chef.

I must confess that I have a very sweet tooth, but even my molars began to ache as I watched the vast amounts of sugar and other sweetening agents that are included in the making of these very rich-looking delicacies.

The film reaches its climax when Yazid is on the team representing France in the 2014 Gelato World Cup competition, which, without giving away any secrets, they win. “Their recipes moved us,” says a judge, but he doesn’t say how.

The inevitable photographs of the real Yazid and his family that accompany the closing credits are a reminder that director Sebastien Tulard’s saccharine saga is a real-life fairytale.