SCREEN

THÉRÈSE

Martin Stein

It must have been a bad year for saints when Pope Pius XI canonized this French girl, dead at the age of 24 of tuberculosis. Two miracles are usually required, but the most Thérèse coughs up is one, essentially consisting of her discovery that there is no Santa Claus.


That is also the most exciting moment of what is a tedious, poorly acted waste of time (unless, that is, you also pick up on the lesbian undertones between her and her eldest sister). After a trip to the Vatican to get the pope's blessing, Thérèse joins the Carmelites at 15, quickly becoming the nuns' Stepin Fetchit, happily accepting their malice and scorn—a more miserable, bitchy group of nuns you could never see.


At the film's end, it is explained that the pope made her a saint because she proved that even a simple soul can go to heaven. In an inadvertently humorous exchange between Lindsay Younce as Thérèse and Judith Kaplan as the mother superior of her order, she's even told that the closer she gets to God, the simpler she will become. Sitting through this 96-minute-long torture (it seemed twice that), I too felt simpleminded.

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