“Fatima” (M) *** and a half

WE don’t see many movies from or about Portugal. It’s a small country that tends to keep its head down and stay away from media attention.

Italian director Marco Pontecorvo has made a film about a rural Portuguese community that might possibly have got more media attention had there not been something else more newsworthy going on in Europe at the time. 

On May 13, 1917, 10-year-old Lucia Santos and her younger cousins Jacinta and Francisco were minding a small flock of sheep near the village of Fatima. That much is incontrovertible. But the fallout from that day is still having a ripple effect in the Catholic Church.

Pontecorvo’s film creates passages portraying what occurred on the 13th day of the next six months. For Lucia and her cousins went home that evening with a story that at first nobody believed. They had a vision of the Virgin who entrusted them with three secrets that she would reveal in full when she re-appeared on those six 13th days.

The screenplay by Valerio D’Annunzio takes a balanced view of the effect that news of the vision created. 

Harvey Keitel plays an American academic who engages the adult Lucia (played by Sonia Braga) when she was Sister María Lúcia das Dores in a gentle debate based on the difference between belief and knowledge.

To her dying day in 2005 aged 97, Lucia’s faith was unshakeable. The two younger cousins were dead within a year of the first vision, in the 1918 plague.

So what goes on in the film? Its drama embraces many elements – pilgrims flocking to the village, church dignitaries trying to dominate the children’s insistence about the vision, strangers arriving seeking favours or intercession with the Virgin, pedlars of religious trinkets and the mayor trying to maintain order not only in the community but also in his bedroom. 

I am a non-believer in any book-based and/or bureaucratised faith. But I found “Fatima” an agreeable depiction of how mankind’s need for an all-embracing idea could be twisted to suit differing viewpoints. I have no idea how devout Christians will receive it.

At Palace Electric