{"id":378018,"date":"2025-08-27T16:05:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T16:05:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/378018\/"},"modified":"2025-08-27T16:05:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T16:05:11","slug":"noomi-rapace-in-spiky-mother-teresa-biopic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/378018\/","title":{"rendered":"Noomi Rapace in Spiky Mother Teresa Biopic"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tMother Teresa (1910-1997), the ethnically Albanian nun born in what is now known as North Macedonia and whose name has become a synonym for saintly goodness, was officially canonized in 2016, mostly for her missionary work with the poorest of the poor in Kolkata, India. But she continues to be a controversial figure, loved and worshipped by many Catholics but reviled by others who accuse her of hypocrisy and cruelty. Her most eloquent critic, the journalist Christopher Hitchens, once wrote<\/a> that she \u201cwas not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty.\u201d And that was one of his kinder aper\u00e7us.<\/p>\n

\n\tMacedonian writer-director Teona Strugar Mitevska (The Happiest Man in the World) clearly feels a kinship with her countrywoman. With Mother, partly inspired by Alexander Sokurov\u2019s offbeat portraits of Hitler (Moloch) and Lenin (Taurus), Mitevska threads the dirty needle with a decidedly non-hagiographic portrait of Teresa as a youngish mother superior in 1948 when she was about to leave her original order, the Sisters of Loreto, to start up her own outfit, the Missionaries of Charity. With crucial assistance from lead Noomi Rapace<\/a>, in sterling form here with a coiled, subtle performance, Mother limns a Teresa whose stern expressions barely conceal the rolling boil of ambition, passionate attachments and religious fervor bubbling inside her.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tMother \t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\tNeither holy perfect nor a god-awful mess.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue:<\/strong> Venice Film Festival (Horizons)
Cast: <\/strong>Noomi Rapace, Sylvia Hoeks, Nikola Ristanovski, Ekin Corapci, Marijke Pinoy, Akshay Kapoor, Amrita Chattopadhyay
Director:<\/strong> Teona Strugar Mitevska
Screenwriters: <\/strong>Goce Smilevski, Teona Strugar Mitevska, Elma Tataragic
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 44 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tPartly informed by Mitevska\u2019s own research for her 2000 documentary Teresa and I, Mother also suggests Teresa might have been a less-than-ideal line manager, prone to capricious power games with the nuns working under her. At worst, she comes across as spiteful and cruel to those who disappoint her, such as her prot\u00e9g\u00e9e Sister Agnieszka (Sylvia Hoeks), who unwisely gets herself knocked up. <\/p>\n

\n\tMitevska\u2019s attempt to expose some of the hidden warts underneath the shellacked saintly image of Teresa is punchy and Mother\u2019s whimsical touches, like the use of hard-rocking guitar shreds on the soundtrack and spooky dream sequences, add edge. Those hoping for a more thorough dismantling of the Mother Teresa shrine of popular imagination will be disappointed that the screenplay, credited to Goce Smilevski, Mitevska and previous collaborator Elma Tataragic, doesn\u2019t play rougher. But such is the fashion these days with filmmakers who, despite their known leftist allegiances, bend over backwards to be balanced when depicting the likes of Donald Trump (The Apprentice<\/a>), Dick Cheney (Vice) or Boris Johnson (British TV\u2019s This England).<\/p>\n

\n\tAs with those latter films, Mother works as well as it does thanks to the charismatic central performance. That\u2019s crucial because, although the screenplay is grounded in biographical research, Mitevska eschews expository monologues that might fill in backstory. The script even sprinkles the dialogue with unfinished sentences, frequent interruptions and teasing lacunae, allowing viewers to fill in blanks as they wish. For example, it\u2019s never made clear whether anything palpable happened between Teresa and her confessor Father Friedrich (Nikola Ristanovski), although at one point a disgruntled nun hisses a rumor that they were lovers. You\u2019d think, given Teresa\u2019s dedication to chastity and staunch belief that any kind of contraception let alone abortion is an abomination, that it\u2019s unlikely she and Friedrich ever got busy knocking sandals. But then again, maybe that\u2019s exactly why she\u2019s so uptight about conceptions that aren\u2019t immaculate?<\/p>\n

\n\tEither way, the pair\u2019s intense conversations feel freighted with feelings, especially when it comes to discussing who will replace Teresa as the Sisters of Loreto\u2019s mother superior if and when the word comes through from the Pope granting her permission to found a new order. Friedrich favors gentle-mannered Agnieszka, a Pole who escaped the Holocaust back in Europe, and a gifted teacher of children. With tendrils of blonde hair always trying to escape her wimple, there\u2019s an ineluctable sensuality about Agnieszka. <\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s hinted that Teresa may see something of a younger version of herself in Agnieszka, which may be why she so fiercely rejects her when Agnieszka reveals her pregnancy. After Agnieszka visits the local Indian doctor (Akshay Kapoor) to inquire about an abortion, Teresa predictably flames out and locks Agnieszka in her room, telling the other nuns that she\u2019s suffering from gastric complaints.<\/p>\n

\n\tAll this unfolds while the days count down, flagged by bold onscreen graphics, to the Day Zero when Teresa will get her papal dispensation and leave the convent to start her new order. She\u2019s already thought out how they will wear simple white and blue saris like the local women, how much leave they will be allowed to go home and visit their family (precious little), and how they will devote themselves to ministering to the poor, the leprous and the outcast. There will be no comfy whitewashed buildings like the Sisters of Lareto enjoy, or impromptu ball games in the courtyard. Fun is not high on Teresa\u2019s agenda.<\/p>\n

\n\tDespite the austerity of her ambitions, there are moments of lush imagination that leaven the tone somewhat, like a dream sequence in which Teresa, furiously making bread in the middle of the night, is teased by an impish child. Soon, she imagines her sisters floating as if on roller skates or wheeled dollies through moonlit corridors while electric guitars and vocalists wail away like heavy metal wraiths. <\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s not what you\u2019d expect from a film about Mother Teresa, and Hitchens surely wouldn\u2019t have approved of anything that risked making her seem cooler and hipper than she was. Mitevska clearly has no such scruples. Perhaps the desire to make Teresa vivid to viewers today would explain the numerous possibly intentional anachronisms in the costuming and design, such as the use of zippers on the nuns\u2019 robes, t-shirts on the Kolkata extras advertising contemporary brands like YouTube, and the unmistakable modernity of the Indian locations used, especially at the very end. Or maybe we\u2019re to infer that we\u2019re seeing Teresa\u2019s saintly ghost walking through a contemporary street market. If so, the theology is a little wonky but the filmmaking has an undoubtedly visionary swagger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mother Teresa (1910-1997), the ethnically Albanian nun born in what is now known as North Macedonia and whose…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378019,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,131874,16,15,22961,131875,126619,131876],"class_list":{"0":"post-378018","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-noomi-rapace","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-venice","14":"tag-venice-2025","15":"tag-venice-film-festival","16":"tag-venice-film-festival-2025"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115101586232607676","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}