Fatima (2020)
The drummer in the market square beats out a litany of death, calling the villagers together as the mayor recites the latest roll call of townsmen who fell in World War I. The year is 1917 and the setting, a small town in Portugal, a country that hurled its young men into the machinery of modern war to “defend the ideals of our republic,” the mayor adds disingenuously.
The town is Fatima, a name familiar to Roman Catholics and students of the varieties of religious experience. In Fatima that year three cousins—aged 10, 9 and 7—claimed to have repeatedly witnessed an apparition of a Lady in White who identified herself as the Virgin Mary. Crowds gathered as rumors spread, reaching tens of thousands. Some said they were healed. Other hopefuls died. The crowds demanded miracles and at the Lady’s final appearance, some in the audience saw one.
In Fatima, Italian filmmaker Marco Pontecorvo tells the story in an interesting manner, dramatizing without over dramatizing, weaving a full picture of the society—its anxieties and political tensions—surrounding the three cousins. The anticlerical Portuguese Republic, busily and belatedly imposing the Enlightenment with a heavy hand, suspects counterrevolution in the crowds gathered for a glimpse of heaven. The village priest warns that the devil can disguise himself in “reassuring shapes” and the Church hierarchy demands that the children confess to making it all up. Steadfast, they refuse. The stubborn yet fearful performances by the cast of child actors is crucial to maintaining the story line.
The film focuses on the oldest child, Lucia, depicted as an imaginative and willful girl who lies in the grass and listens to the wind. One day while playing in their parents’ pastures, Lucia and her cousins hear thunder and see lights flash in the blue sky. The sun hangs strangely in the tree branches as the Lady in White appears, benign but melancholy in countenance. Interestingly, in the town named for Muhammad’s favorite daughter, Fatima, the Lady favors the girls. Lucinda and Jacincta hear her speak but Francisco can only see the apparition. In later scenes, crowds are depicted watching the three children as they kneel before nothing, Lucia carrying on a conversation with an unseen speaker and relating her words to a world that can’t hear.
So what did the Lady in White tell Lucia? She spoke of peace, predicted that the war would end soon (it ended one year later) and that a more terrible war would follow (right). Her message was wrapped in the particular Roman language of the “Immaculate Heart of Mary” and an insistence on praying the rosary. One of Fatima’s best devices is to occasionally cut forward to a 1980s discussion between the aged Lucia (who became a nun) and a skeptical academic (played by Harvey Keitel). Why is it, he asks, that divine manifestations “always match the traditional iconography of the culture in which they appear?” Is it the unconscious desire of the person so blessed to meet the divine? he wonders. “You call it the unconscious. I call it God” she replies. “He manifests himself in the form they expect.”
Spoiler alert—if you’re not familiar with how the story ends. At the Lady in White’s final apparition, many in a crowd numbering in tens of thousands reported strange things in the sky. The claims were contradictory. Some said the sun zig-zagged; others spoke of weird halos or kaleidoscopic colors, even the solar disc careening toward the ground. Some saw nothing unusual. It was like a shared psychedelic encounter with everyone experiencing an altered reality according to their own lights. As for the film version, the special effects at the climax were (deliberately?) low key.
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