Hail Mary movie review & film summary (1986)
In the Godard film, Mary is an ordinary teenager who plays basketball and vows that she will sleep with no man. Her father runs a service station. Her boyfriend, Joseph, drives a taxi. An angel arrives by jet plane, is taken to the service station in Joseph's taxi and tells Mary that she will soon bear God's child.
In the film, much is made of Mary's puzzlement over this announcement. When she discovers that she is pregnant, she insists to her parents, Joseph and her gynecologist that she is a virgin - something that her doctor confirms. Although her visit to the gynecologist has been described as particularly offensive, I didn't find it so. It serves as a reminder that this woman was not only the mother of Christ, but also, in every respect, a human being with apprehensions and fears. A central fact of Catholicism is that God became man, but when we sentimentalize the figure of Mary into a bloodless, asexual abstraction, we diminish the meaning of that fact.
The film is resolute in placing Mary's situation in a modern-day frame of reference, with contemporary expressions, reactions and opinions. Is this irreverent? I don't believe so. Much has been made of the fact that Mary plays girls' basketball, as if this is a sacrilege.
I believe Godard put her on the team in an attempt to make her seem like an average teenager - as the completely human being that God chose to bear his son. God did, after all, create basketball and basketball players, and there are times when I suspect that he is a DePaul fan.
The professions of Joseph and Mary's father also have become controversial. But why? If Joseph could be a carpenter in the New Testament, why not a taxi driver? The point is to show him as an everyday workingman.
Most of the controversy about "Hail Mary" centers on the nudity in the film, of which there is a good deal. It is not, however, the sort of prurient and degrading nudity that one can see in dozens of hard-core porno films that play in Chicago every month. It is the sort of objective, non-sexual nudity that we might expect as a young girl questions the miracle that is happening within her body.
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