The Apparition

Music Box Films | Release Date: September 7, 2018

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Bertaut1Sep 7, 2018

Quite a mess

L'Apparition is a film with many of the prerequisite ingredients to produce a fine piece of work, not the least of which is an intriguing set-up with a built-in opportunity for weighty social and/or ecclesiastical commentary.Quite a mess

L'Apparition is a film with many of the prerequisite ingredients to produce a fine piece of work, not the least of which is an intriguing set-up with a built-in opportunity for weighty social and/or ecclesiastical commentary. However, whilst the idea is sound, the execution is poor, and due to some very basic missteps, the narrative's potential profundity is rendered singularly uninteresting.

Written and directed by Xavier Giannoli, with Marcia Romano and Jacques Fieschi credited with "collaboration", the film tells the story of Jacques Mayano (Vincent Lindon), a French photographer just returned from an unspecified war zone where his colleague was killed in a bomb blast. As a result of the explosion, Mayano is having aural problems and suffering from PTSD. Upon returning to France, he is contacted by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints - the body within the Vatican which investigates claims of miracles. A young girl named Anna (Galatéa Bellugi) claims to have seen a Marian apparition in a field. However, the local parish priest, Fr. Borrodine (Patrick d'Assumçao), has cut off contact with the Church hierarchy, and is using a not-unwilling Anna to entice pilgrimages to the area, subsequently encouraging the devout to purchase items in a spectacularly tacky gift store. In an attempt to ascertain the merit, or lack thereof, of Anna's vision, the Congregation want Mayano to head an investigative team.

It's a fine raison d'être, and the first act is excellent, depicting Mayano learning the Congregation's inner workings, spending time in the Vatican Apostolic Library reviewing documents detailing both valid and invalid miracles, travelling to the village, and meeting his team (a combination of secular and laity). However, once the investigation proper begins, the bottom falls out, as Giannoli seems to have no idea where to take the story.

For a start, the film is far, far too long; clocking in at 144 minutes, it could easily have lost a half-hour without compromising the story. In fact, the whole thing felt like a workprint. In tandem with this, there are so many half-developed subplots which never integrate with the main narrative - Mayano's PTSD and hearing problems, orphans, a children's home, adoption, mysterious letters, a missing girl, possible profiteering from Anna's visions. Additionally, with so much going on at a plot level, both Mayano and Anna are under-written, with virtually no character development between them.

However, the biggest problem is that the film simply can't make up its mind as to what it wants to be - an examination of canonical doctrine or a mystery. And because of this, the plot is shaky at best, with the superficial far outweighing the substance. Additionally, it concludes with a wholly unnecessary and poorly conceived twist that plays out as relatively unrelated to what we've just spent the last two hours watching.

Another problem, given the inherently evocative nature of the subject matter, is that Giannoli misses the opportunity to engage with the implications thrown up by the arcane dogma of an investigation; the nature of apparitions in both a contemporary and historical sense; the Church's attitude to instances where they were unable to debunk the claimant; the Congregation's prerequisites for approving canonisation; their tendency to mix the ordained with the professional on the investigative teams. None of these issues are explored in any way, as the film sets up an intriguing providential-based framework, but then fails to introduce the scrutiny with which to analyse the surrounding themes.

In the film's EPK, Giannoli says of Mayano, "he has come across a world in which proof counts for nothing and the invisible world keeps its secrets." And this is where the biggest problem lies; the twist doesn't integrate with the rest of the film, and ends up working against the presentation of faith, diluting Giannoli's thematic concerns to the point where it's difficult to tell what he is trying to say. If the film is truly about the invisible world keeping its secrets, why does he feel the need to introduce a twist which thoroughly explains all of those secrets?

Films dealing with this kind of deeply esoteric/metaphysical subject matter can work, look at Lourdes (2009) or Kreuzweg (2014). L'Apparition gets nowhere near their level of analysis. Instead, it's two hours plus of serious people acting seriously, but not actually saying anything of note about anything, capped off with as ill-advised a twist as you're likely to see all year.… Expand

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Mauro_LanariOct 7, 2019

(Mauro Lanari)
Simpler than it looks: Giannoli does metacinema by choosing Lindon as his scenic alter ego, who wonders about the extent to which every kind of representation, artistic and otherwise, seizes reality. Pirandello? Rashomon? The(Mauro Lanari)
Simpler than it looks: Giannoli does metacinema by choosing Lindon as his scenic alter ego, who wonders about the extent to which every kind of representation, artistic and otherwise, seizes reality. Pirandello? Rashomon? The Korzybski of the map-territory relation? Logical problem even before being metaphysical or even religious. The French director starts out perky and he too ends running aground in the causal loop: the mystery can only remain mystery and therefore it can only be explained (shown?) as such. I don't know whether this is correct, but a search for Truth based on these assumptions is condemned to failure on principle. Perhaps then it is worth following Wittgenstein's advice: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, dar-ber muss man schweigen", "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." And must stop filming.… Expand

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