-By Daniel Eagan

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Filmed in an austere, near-documentary style, Lourdes takes viewers deep inside one of the world's most popular religious shrines. Writer and director Jessica Hausner uses a multiple sclerosis patient as a sort of case study to show how the site operates as well as to question the sources of religious faith. Fascinating on social and theological levels, the film is less compelling as a straightforward narrative. Still, adventurous filmgoers will be rewarded by its unusually open-ended storyline.

Over a million "pilgrims" visit Lourdes each year, seeking comfort for physical or mental ailments. Hausner focuses on Christine (Sylvie Testud), a pretty, likeable woman confined to a wheelchair by multiple sclerosis. She is part of a group of pilgrims with various levels of disabilities led by the grim and severe Cécile (Elina Löwensohn). Dependent on volunteer caretakers like Maria (Lea Seydoux) to feed and clothe her, Christine still has a sense of humor and a playful skepticism about the shrine.

Like the other pilgrims and volunteers, Christine, Cécile and Maria are all embarking on a week-long adventure, and all three are tested in ways they, and the viewers, cannot anticipate. Without judging the devout, Hausner addresses the core contradictions in religions like Catholicism with simple but deeply moving scenes. She also finds adroit ways to pose agonizing dilemmas. Why does one person suffer and not another? What God would permit disease? Few motion pictures try to address such fundamental philosophical problems, especially not with Hausner's disarming sympathy and grace.

Much of Lourdes is devoted to the shrine and its workings. Using formal compositions and minimal camera movement, cinematographer Martin Gschlacht lets Lourdes, with all its size and opulence, speak for itself. Shots in which hundreds of wheelchairs line up in rows, or thousands of pilgrims hold candles aloft in a nighttime courtyard, are simply breathtaking. Stunning in a different fashion: statues with neon halos, stores filled with religious bric-a-brac, the sacred reduced to the profane.

Hausner proves an excellent director of actors. In a difficult role as Christine, Testud (who has a key role in Johnnie To's Vengeance) is both polished and appealing. Löwensohn is equally assured in a part that unfolds in halting, painful steps. Also impressive is Gerhard Liebmann as a priest who must give advice to desperate and demanding pilgrims.

Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Lourdes is its tone, unusually fair-minded despite its provocative subject matter. The shrine is big business, a way to institutionalize miracles, and Hausner captures its crass, vulgar aspects with a pitiless eye. But it is also a place of inexplicable occurrences, and the film finds a way to show the hunger for faith with both tolerance and doubt. The miracles in Lourdes cause more problems than they cure, a point of view that is simultaneously hard-edged and generous. Hausner's film is about as far away from mainstream escapism as you could imagine. It is also satisfying in ways that fiction rarely achieves.