The Appari­tion

Pro­ce­dur­al inves­ti­ga­tion movies tend to pose ques­tions such as: who killed this guy, who stole the cash or where on earth is this miss­ing woman? Xavier Giannolli’s new film, The Appari­tion, lays down a conun­drum to flum­mox even the most sea­soned of gumshoe – does God actu­al­ly exist?

Vin­cent Lin­don, a seri­ous man for a seri­ous role, plays Jacques Mayano, a surly pho­to­jour­nal­ist who has seen it all. In fact, he’s been in close prox­im­i­ty to so much human suf­fer­ing that, from a pro­fes­sion­al van­tage, he’s actu­al­ly open to some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. And then, shut away in his house, blinds com­plete­ly closed, he receives a call from… the Vatican?

It turns out that a whey-faced, chron­i­cal­ly bash­ful teenag­er named Anna (Galatéa Bel­lu­gi) claims to have seen an appari­tion of the Vir­gin Mary in a field out­side of a south­ern French vil­lage. A Roman car­di­nal ear­marks Jacques as the per­fect ​“scep­tic” to enter the fray and dis­cern whether she’s invent­ing the whole thing. The affair is treat­ed with an air of high seri­ous­ness, redo­lent of an actu­al crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion, and Jacques is sup­plied with a full team of inves­ti­ga­tors – some believ­ers, oth­ers not.

There’s an inter­est­ing notion at the core of the film, which is the bare­ly vis­i­ble line that exists between respect­ing the beliefs of oth­ers, and inter­ven­ing when it becomes clear that they’re being duped by some nefar­i­ous force. The local church has cor­ralled around Anna, whip­ping up her sta­tus as a reli­gious celebri­ty. The con­gre­ga­tion halls are now sud­den­ly kit­ted out with light­ing rigs and video mon­i­tors, and Anna is being pin­balled between guest spots on inter­net TV chat shows and pho­to shoots for craven mer­chan­dis­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. To an out­sider, it may all appear a lit­tle cyn­i­cal, espe­cial­ly as this new cho­sen one doesn’t appear at all enam­oured by the atten­tion she’s receiv­ing. Yet she sees a kin­dred spir­it in Jacques, who smells a rat from the off.

Giannolli’s seri­ous, slow-burn dra­ma is at its best when keep­ing slith­ers of key infor­ma­tion just out of sight, shift­ing away from the ques­tion of whether Anna is being coerced into lying and retain­ing ques­tions of a more philo­soph­i­cal bent in its glassy sight-lines. The film is out­spo­ken in its crit­i­cism of the Church and of parochial igno­rance. Yet, as the plot devel­ops, it does ask whether it’s real­ly such a bad thing that the lives of so many peo­ple have been enriched by a sense of false hope – the blind faith that there is some high­er being look­ing out for them. And is that real­ly such a bad thing? Is log­ic just a cru­el mis­tress which is the first stop on the road to chron­ic depression?

At the point where mat­ters are reach­ing crit­i­cal mass, the film takes a bit of a wrong turn, opt­ing to close things out on an unsight­ly full stop rather than an intrigu­ing ques­tion mark. Visu­al­ly the film con­tains a few nice moments, espe­cial­ly scenes of nuns fill­ing duvet cas­es with feath­ers. Gian­nol­li at the very least has an eye for fram­ing and com­po­si­tion, even when he leans a lit­tle too heav­i­ly on shots of Jacques clutch­ing his brow with a hand­i­ly placed cru­ci­fix with­in the frame.

Lin­don is, as usu­al, good val­ue, and treats the mate­r­i­al with the utmost grav­i­ty, while Bel­lu­gi does well to sus­tain the mys­tery for as long as she does.