Bernadette (1988)

A Major Disappointment

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

I love this film. I'm almost addicted to it. It is factual and very moving without being sentimental. I take nothing away from THE SONG OF BERNADETTE, but it would have been better not to show the virgin. It is difficult to avoid sentimentality when trying to portray her, and this film is down to earth and anything but sentimental.My only criticism, if it is one, is that the DVD can only be purchased in Italian! Why is this? It can be seen in English on YouTube so why can it not be bought in English on DVD? PLEASE release it in English! You Tube can be unreliable. I can no longer watch it on Television as I am told the You Tube App I have is for some reason now invalid on my machine. Watching it on a device or a PC I find it uncomfortable. A lovely film, though; anyone who does not know Lourdes or heard of Saint Bernadette, should see it

When I was in Lourdes, I wanted to see this version, which plays daily at the small movie theatre -- but the theatre had shut down for the season. I finally got to see this on DVD recently. I was aware that the version with Jennifer Jones, "The Song of Bernadette" took quite a few dramatic liberties with the story so I was eager to see how this version compared. The attempt here is to present a more accurate re-telling of both the miracles as well as Bernadette's family life. We don't have the antagonists in this like we do in the original and we don't have much of the dramatic conflicts that drive the original so as a narrative, this doesn't work as well, but the story is told with beauty and simplicity. The settings far more accurately represent what Lourdes really looked like too. I think this is well worth watching for anyone interested in Lourdes.

Critically speaking ,this new version of Bernadette Soubirous' s life was greeted with a poor reception in its native France.Coming just after critically-acclaimed Alain Cavalier's "Therese" (de Lisieux) ,the movie got unanimous thumb downs.And yet what can you expect from Jean Delannoy ,Jean Luc Godard's favorite bete noire?This movie seems to have been made a long time ago.Delannoy,however, has always had spiritual concerns (Dieu a besoin des hommes,la symphonie pastorale)and I'm not sure that,at almost 90,he was trying to capitalize on Cavalier's success."Bernadette" did not deserve such a harshness.As Delannoy says in the cast and credits ,Bernadette was simplicity itself and that's what we tried to do here.A naive uneducated girl ,her answers to the shrinks ,the priests and the bourgeois were not unlike those of Joan of Arc during her trial:simple but witty.And I dig the last lines (A nun) -C'est ça Bernadette? (the Saint) -Oui,c'est ça!Jean Delannoy was to continue in the pious vein with "Marie de Nazareth" but that last effort lacks even the humor we find in "Bernadette" and it was a disappointment.

This movie gets a lot of details right (or almost right) concerning the life of St. Bernadette. Song of Bernadette was beautifully written, but there wasn't as much effort to be accurate. Hence, this movie is great if you want a clearer idea of the life of this saint, and the circumstances she experienced. She is interpreted quite a bit differently from Song of Bernadette: with an emphasis on her human weaknesses to the point of melodrama. The movie received a PG rating because of some strong derogatory language that is aimed at Bernadette by some who were against her. The movie ends with her entrance into the convent, and the story is picked up in a sequel: The Passion of Bernadette, which I consider to be a better, more focused movie than this one.