MOVIE REVIEW : WHAT WE SEE IS ALL WE GET IN ‘THERESE’

Among the presents that Dylan Thomas remembered so warmly in “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” was a child’s encyclopedia “which told everything about the wasp but why .”

That’s exactly the case with “Therese” (Friday at the Beverly Center Cineplex). You may learn a lot about the beamingly cheerful spirit of Therese Martin (St. Therese of Lisieux, 1873-1897), the child-nun who would later be known as the Little Flower of Jesus. But the crucial “why” that propelled a 15-year-old into an austere Carmelite convent, then out of this life at the age of 24, remains as big a mystery at the end of this film as at the beginning. And director Alain Cavalier prefers not to give any hints.

What he provides are a series of startlingly original, spare and haunting scenes--some in such fast succession they’re like a series of great Polaroids that become a mosaic of Therese’s short and glowingly devout life.

Cavalier, who also co-wrote the screenplay with his daughter, Camille de Casabianca, has staged these glimpses on an extremely narrow stage, with a very minimum of furniture from the period and in monotones: flesh color, grays, beiges, whites. One red blanket comes with the shock of a nosebleed. To walk from one “room” to another, an actor simply moves a few feet along this photographer’s taupey-gray no-seam paper background, atmospherically lit by the film’s splendid cinematographer Philippe Rousselot.

Amid all this restful chic, we may be squinting for some glimmer of understanding--or at least to locate the director’s feelings about Therese. But Cavalier is as impassive as Catherine Mouchet, his young leading actress, is radiant.

What was the source of Therese’s calling, that passion to join her two older sisters in the Carmelite order, which made her hector the church hierarchy, up to and including the Pope, until permission was granted for so young a girl to join these cloistered sisters? Cavalier shows it as romantic ecstasy that grips the young Therese the way Beatlemania gripped the young girls of London.

As she and another young novice are gutting the cloister’s fish, Therese advises her friend on ways to approach Jesus: “Fondle him--that’s how I snared him.” Then the two collapse in giggles at the notion of “falling for a guy who lived 2,000 years ago.”

Clearly, we are a long way from “The Song of Bernadette,” and probably a good thing too. You will not catch the French giving smarmy or mystical reasons for anything. What might be nice is, if they let us have variations of temperament or character so that we could create our own explanations. But Therese, with her vow of becoming “a great saint in secret,” is played at the same radiant high from start to finish. And that radiance is like a high-gloss varnish--or like the glass bell jar that her father places for a second over Therese’s head; we simply cannot penetrate it.

The other Carmelites too, with the exception of Lucie, who loves her (Helene Alexandridis, who plays with a sort of Amanda Plummer fierceness), are each given the job of sustaining a single note. And we are allowed to hear virtually nothing from Therese’s penciled diary--in which she set out the Little Way, sanctity through humble tasks--which became proof for her later sainthood and enormously popular reading when it was published after her death.

Throughout, the makers of this airless, exquisitely beautiful work remain elegantly detached. Its visual accomplishment, which is immense, gives “Therese” a hypnotic pull, at least through its first half. But if you go to it to understand even a little of the ways of a saint, you may be baffled, frustrated or even (heaven forbid) cranky.