Rapace plays the canonised Kolkata nun with hard-bitten intensity in a complex, lurid story that veers between faithful telling and bouts of fun
T
he convent is a pressure cooker in this fevered, energetic account of a pivotal week in the life of the young Mother Teresa, which jump-starts the Orizzonti sidebar at this year’s Venice film festival. Macedonian writer-director Teona Strugar Mitevska ticks down the days from seven to one and wrings a performance of flayed, hard-bitten intensity from Noomi Rapace, who marches down the corridors with a face full of fury. Rapace is a long way from her breakout role in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; tonally, though, not so much. If Mother Teresa never goes so far as to set about the sisters with an axe, the sense that she might injects Mitevska’s film with a pleasing dose of danger.
It is 1948, we’re in the broiling heart of Kolkata and Sister Teresa has tired of her teaching role at the Loreto Entally convent. “I’m a woman in a system run by men,” she complains to sympathetic Father Friedrich (Nikola Ristanovski), although she has also heard a call from the big man upstairs.
Teresa applies to the Vatican for permission to set up her own mission, but the response takes an age, her patience wears thin and she has a more immediate problem. When her heir apparent, Sister Agnieszka (Sylvia Hoeks), admits that she is pregnant, Teresa is duly scandalised. She loves Sister Agnieszka but is repulsed by her, too. “I would never jeopardise my mission for earthly pleasures,” she declares in one of many examples of overly on-the-nose dialogue.
