I am glad that the saints continue to be an inspiration to writers and filmmakers. We shouldn’t resent them trying to make great art with these holy lives. But as one sometimes “had to be there” to get the point of certain stories, it would seem that for some fictional depictions to succeed, you really do have to have some inside understanding of the mysteries by which a saint lives.
St. John Henry Newman once offered his hope that if somebody wrote about his life, it would be “a downright account,” not the sort of pious treacle that so often passes for the lives of religious figures. It’s a tricky business, of course, depicting a life of (to use the Protestant spiritual writer Eugene Peterson’s phrase) “a long obedience in the same direction.” That’s because even for the saint, such a path is almost always filled with difficulties of various sorts, sometimes tortuous moments when darkness seems overwhelming. How does one understand these moments? How can the biographer—whether in written words or through images—depict the life and inevitable struggles of a holy person? While Flannery O’Connor was surely correct in some ways that the Catholic novelist didn’t have to be a Catholic but did have to be a novelist, a recent movie reaffirms for me that this is a point that has limits.
“Mother Teresa & Me,” a 2022 film released in India and Europe, made its U. S. debut on October 5 as a one-time showing at select theaters through Fathom Events. A colleague who is also a Dominican religious sister asked if I’d like to come, so I joined about 30 white-habited women at the local AMC to watch a story about the little Albanian nun who became a world-famous figure and then a canonized Catholic saint. I was particularly interested since I’m going to be using the 2010 collection of Mother Teresa’s writings titled Where There is Love, There is God in class this term. Would this movie be something I could recommend to students and friends?
Being too often online in order to be in the know, I was actually somewhat thrilled not to have any preconceived ideas about the film before I got there. As it turned out, the film was actually about two interweaving narratives in different times that come together at the end. The film begins with Mother Teresa scavenging through a neighborhood for food after a 1946 riot in Calcutta—before independence was granted. A Muslim rioter menaces her with a sword before a Hindu soldier shoots him. The film then cuts to a contemporary young British woman of Indian descent named Kavita, who is hit by a car after one of her violin performances. The rest of the film is a series of cuts between an account of the young nun who determines that she has a call to start a new religious order that takes radical hospitality as its charism and that of the young woman who discovers in the hospital that she is pregnant with a fellow musician’s baby, has been abandoned by him, and now has decisions to make about her life.
The depiction of Mother Teresa’s journey has some excellent moments early on. The drama of the beginning takes on a deeper dimension with a clever and moving staging of the legendary visions she had while riding on a train. Her perseverance in the face of Hindu hostility, the slothful despair of rich medical professionals, and even some skeptical Catholic clergy is fairly well done. One gets a bit of the sense of purity as desiring and acting toward one thing—sometimes ferociously.
Yet over the movie, Swiss actress Jacqueline Fritsch-Cornaz never really quite captures the saint. It’s not just that the actress is almost a foot taller than the character she’s playing—though it may be partly that, as Fritsch-Cornaz seems to be stooping quite often in order not to tower over the other female characters. But it is more than that. Her depiction has a bit too much Germanic angst about it, with eyes set as if she is looking off into the distance or somewhat angry. She never quite gets down the smile of Mother Teresa.
On the other hand, the radiant young Banita Sandhu, who plays Kavita, is utterly sympathetic as a young woman who is lost between continents and between faith and secularism. She decides to flee her parents, who have been plotting to get her married off to a nice Indian boy, by traveling back to her birthplace in Calcutta. There she stays with an old family friend Deepali, played by Deepti Naval, who though not Catholic, has been working with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity for decades. She takes Kavita to see the fruit of Mother Teresa’s labors, especially Mother Teresa’s House of the Dying and her nursery for abandoned infants and children.
These modern-day visits, in which Kavita comes to see something beautiful in those who are weak and, with the dying, not physically beautiful or hopeful, are interspersed with the story of how these institutions of Mother Teresa’s had been set up and how Mother Teresa herself struggled in her life. And this is where the movie really falters.
More than anything, Mother Teresa seems driven more by despair and anxiety than anything else: haunted by the early loss of and possible hostility from her own mother, frustrated by the world of cruelty and apathy she sees around her, and, most of all, completely in doubt about whether any of the Catholic faith is true. The depiction of Mother Teresa’s famous dark night of the soul, revealed in the collection of letters and diaries published by Harper in 2007 under the title Come Be My Light, is flatly depicted in the film by writer and director Kamal Musale, as a complete loss of faith and a “disillusionment.” Her own perseverance is presented as the result of a kind of pretend faith that allows her to go on with her charitable activity.
This is, in fact, the opposite of how Mother Teresa thought of it.
Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., a priest who had worked with Mother Teresa for years, served as postulator of her cause for sainthood, and edited Come Be My Light, criticized the film not only for its depiction of a grim and joyless figure in middle age, but for the interpretation of her dark night as the destruction of her faith. In fact, he said, “one of the most profound things about Mother Teresa is that she never ‘lost her faith,’ even amid desolation and uncertainty. Her personal letters speak of her ‘unbroken union’ [with God] during her darkness and observe that ‘my mind and heart is habitually with God.’ She describes the ‘doubt’ in which she lived ‘for the rest of her life’ as a trial of faith—an experience well-known in the Catholic mystical tradition.”
Mother Teresa was not faking or pretending to hold to God in faith. She was walking courageously and joyfully even as the feelings of closeness to God were absent and the truths to which she adhered seemed themselves sometimes unbelievable and incomprehensible. A real downright account of her life would be able to convey these paradoxes of the feeling of absence and union, intellectual uncertainty and peace, desolation and joy. It is perhaps not absolutely necessary to be a Christian to get this right. The non-Christian writer Mark Salzman’s novel Lying Awake (2000), about a nun who has mystical experiences of presence and absence, does about as good a job as you can without being inside the faith. But Musale’s film does not get this right.
Perhaps it’s because the saint’s depiction is off that the searching Kavita’s character is uncertain. Though she grows throughout the film, her ending is unclear. To the father of her child’s inquiries about having the baby, she responds in an ambiguous fashion about how she would herself be all right. What does that mean? One doesn’t have to have every character given the fullness of redemption in a film about a saint, but it seems as though Kavita’s story doesn’t have an ending. It’s perhaps no wonder that the review in the Times of India concluded that viewers “may be left questioning the purpose of the dual narrative” and that the whole film “falls short of providing a truly immersive experience for viewers” and “misses an opportunity to create a truly captivating and memorable story.”
I am glad that the saints continue to be an inspiration to writers and filmmakers. We shouldn’t resent them trying to make great art with these holy lives. But as one sometimes “had to be there” to get the point of certain stories, it would seem that for some fictional depictions to succeed, you really do have to have some inside understanding of the mysteries by which a saint lives.
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The featured image is courtesy of IMDb.