Thérèse is finally here

By Susan Brinkmann
CS&T Correspondent

One of the most beloved stories ever told is finally gracing the screens of two area theaters in the Philadelphia Archdiocese, but Catholics need to see it quickly or the film may leave the area before many viewers have a chance to see it.
The long-awaited Luke Films production of Thérèse opened Sept. 30 at the Regal theater in Plymouth Meeting and on Columbus Avenue in the city. Within 24 hours, the movie was ranked 19th in popularity out of the 143 movies showing this past weekend in U.S. theaters.
Sandwiched between films such as Resident Evil: Apocalypse, and Shaun of the Dead, the story of the gentle saint of Lisieux shines like a sunbeam. It opens with the sight of a quill pen scratching across the page of a small square notebook. Viewers see little of the white-robed sister holding the pen, but recognize her as Thérèse when a woman’s voice proclaims, “My God, I want to be a saint. But I feel so helpless.”
So begins the first full-length feature film of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. Producer Leonardo Defilippis dazzles his audience with lavish costumes and the magnificent Normandy countryside where Thérèse lived at the end of the 19th century. The saint’s first appearance is as a little girl in a field of flowers who falls into her mother’s lap and cries, “Oh Mama, how I wish you would die.”
“Thérèse,”scolds her father, Louis Martin (played by Defilippis). “How can you say such a thing?”
“Because I want her to go to heaven,” Thérèse replies.
The next scene is of a coffin, and the four-year-old Thérèse watching her mother’s funeral from afar. It is the first tear in the gossamer veil that separates the realities of life from the Little Flower of Lisieux.
Defilippis is not afraid to depict the sorrows of her short life, including the harsh treatment she endured from envious schoolmates, or her grief over her sister Pauline’s departure to the cloistered life of the Carmelite sisters. But these scenes are interwoven with happier experiences, such as the special love lavished by Louis Martin on his “little queen,”and the joy of the five Martin sisters dancing in the family parlor.
Lindsay Younce, who plays Thérèse, is remarkably adept at conveying the spiritual simplicity of the soul of the Little Flower amidst the rich trappings of 19th century France.
When Pauline tells Thérèse of her intention to enter Carmel, Pauline declares, “I have found our desert place. … It is full of roses.” Younce simply turns her face toward the window, her face bright with an expression of mystical wonder. One can almost see the seed of a vocation being planted.
Later, when Thérèse tells her father she also wants to enter the Carmel, she says, “Papa, I just cannot resist His love anymore.” Sitting on a stone bench in a garden of roses, Younce is dressed in an exquisite period gown of pink silk, with a duffle, and waist-long French curls. She might be any Victorian girl speaking to her father about the man she loves.
But in this case, the man is Jesus, and the naturalness of the scene conveys just how real, passionate and exhiliarating can be love between a human being and the Divine.
The saintliness of Louis Martin is also clear throughout the movie, especially when he brings his “little queen”to the door of the convent. “Go my little queen,” he says when Thérèse kneels at his feet. “Go with my blessing.” As she rises and walks through the doors, he looks on, his face awash with tears.
But some of the lightest moments in the film are yet to come, as Thérèse leaps into the life of the cloister. Sister Augustine (Samantha Kramer), continually tries Thérèse’s patience while at the same time delighting the audience. The scene where Thérèse dances into the refectory with an aging sister on her arm is almost as hilarious as the scene in which a make-shift stage on which some sisters are enacting a play about St. Joan of Arc goes up in flames.
Judith Kaplan plays Mother Marie de Gonzague, the good-hearted superior who reminds the scrupulous young Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and Holy Face that “the closer one gets to God, the simpler they become.”
Convent scenes were filmed on sets designed on authentic descriptions of the Carmel of Lisieux during the time St. Thérèse lived there and many items, from statuary to kitchen utensils, were donated by several Carmelite monasteries in the U.S.
The end of the movie is particularly affecting. As Thérèse is dying of asphyxiation, caused by an advanced case of tuberculosis, she sits bolt upright in bed and looks into the face of her Beloved, who has come to escort her home.
With the strains of an original composition by Discalced Carmelite Sister Marie Thérèse Sokol in the background, Thérèse’s sister Pauline (played by Linda Hayden) appears at the window of the convent with Thérèse’s notebook in her hand.
She opens the book and reads, “I will spend my heaven doing good on earth. …”
At the conclusion of the movie, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
“It was just really moving,” said Marie Brett, who came from Roslyn with her husband and son, Robbie, to see the movie at the Plymouth Meeting film complex on Oct. 1, the feastday of St. Thérèse.
“When I was watching the movie, it gave me the heart to try to be a saint,”said her husband, Bob Brett. “Even though her life was miraculous, we can all do it.”
Anne Suplee of Sacred Heart Parish in Manoa added, “I thought it was wonderful. It was very touching.”
And Amy Abromaitis of St. Stanislaus said she cried through the whole movie. “I never do that,” she said. “I thought it was delightful, and very well done.”
A special guest from St. Philip Neri Parish in Pennsburg was also at the Oct. 1 showing — little 1-year old Caitlin Thérèse Daley, whose story appeared in the Sept. 16 issue of The Catholic Standard & Times.
Caitlin’s mother, Colleen, was handing out roses to everyone who left the theater, in celebration of the intervention of St. Thérèse in the life of their daughter, who was diagnosed in utero with severe birth defects that were not present when she was born. “St. Thérèse showered down a lot of roses on us,” Colleen Daley said, “so I’m giving them out to others.”

Contact Susan Brinkmann at fiat723@aol.com or (215) 965-4615.