The Song of Bernadette (1943)

 Henry King's "The Song of Bernadette"


In 1943, Henry King directed his most popular film in decades, perhaps ever. "The Song of Bernadette" tells the story of a 14-year-old French girl who has visions of the Virgin Mary in her local town. The film takes the point of view of the varying perspectives of everyone involved in the situation and explores the varying degrees of certainty and uncertainty faced by the various characters. The film was both a critical and commercial success and skyrocketed Jennifer Jones to fame. 

There were many different emotions I felt while watching this film. Firstly, it began rather interestingly. Watching the skepticism of everyone involved of whether these visions were real or imagined was a great observational study of individual and collective skepticism. After a while, you even begin to root for the belief of the population. There were moments where I found myself wanting every doubting Thomas to come to a divide revelation. I found myself WANTING to believe. This perhaps was the most interesting construct of the film. Like everyone who travels into town from faraway places, I too was wanting a miraculous divinity to reveal itself. However, by the 2-hour mark, with 40 minutes to go, I found the picture to get more and more tedious. There was also nothing visual happening to alleviate this problem. The last 45 minutes of the film seems to reiterate the same plot points again and again. Overall, the film began as a promising venture in belief and collective optimism and skepticism and disintegrated into a redundant treading of water. 



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