European Films

The film promises to be an unusual biopic of a saint to say the least; Loriga previously wrote or co-wrote the screenplays of such diverse films as Pedro Almodóvar’s 1997 noir Carne trémula (Live Flesh), an adaptation of a Ruth Rendell novel; Carlos Saura’s El 7º día (The 7th Day) from 2004 and based on the true story of a blood feud in Northern Spain, and Daniel Calparsoro’s psychological thriller Ausentes (The Absent) from 2005. Loriga, who started his career as a novelist, also wrote and directed 1997’s La pistola de mi hermano (My Brother’s Gun), which was based on his own novel Caidos del cielo.

For his second film as a director, he will tackle the life and death of the woman who was born in 1515 as Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada. The daughter of a nobleman from Ávila, some 85 kilometres northwest of Madrid, young Teresa did not accept her role as a woman in a man’s world and refused to limit herself to being a wife and a mother and wanted to learn how to read and write so she could expand her knowledge even further. To obtain this goal, she secretly entered a closed convent of Carmelite nuns in Ávila at age 20, where during a long illness she started to have the visions that would make her famous.
 
In the convent, she also discovered that laxity and frivolity are just as much present inside the convent walls as outside, something which led her to found her own monastery for Carmelite nuns with the help of her friend and benefactor Guimara de Ulloa (played by Leonor Watling in the film). Artists ranging from the painter Peter Paul Rubens to the sculptor Benini have portrayed St Teresa in ecstasy or writing one of her many texts; she was already a legend during her lifetime, though because of her perceived difference from others, including the Carmelite nuns of Ávila she left behind, she came under frequent attack and was even brought in front of the Inquisition. The charges against her were dropped when King Philip II started to meddle with the affair, a man with whom Teresa had kept up a correspondence for some time. 

Besides Vega and Watling, Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo also stars Geraldine Chaplin (Hable con ella/Talk to Her) as the Prioress of the convent that Teresa enters at 20, Eusebio Poncela (Los Borgia) as Gaspar Daza, José Luis Gómez (Goya’s Ghosts) as Friar Pedro de Alcántara and Álvaro de Luna (Maestros) as Teresa’s father. Just as impressive is the talent behind the cameras that includes cinematographer José Luis Alcaine, who shot Almodóvar’s La mala educación (Bad Education, another film full of religious imagery) and his recent Volver; and Japanese costume designer Eiko Ishioka, who won an Oscar for her work on Francis Ford Coppola’s version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1993.
 
Teresa was canonized by the Catholic Church only forty years after her death and became the first woman to be conferred the title of Doctor of the Church (there are currently three women with that title, the others being St Caterina of Siena and namesake St Therèse of Lisieux). Her writings are considered to be among most important mystic writings in the Christian world and a prime example of Spanish literature of that age.
 
Related links:

• A short online biography of St. Teresa
• the official website of the film (in Spanish and English)

• review: La mala educación (Bad Education)
• previous preview: Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely
• previous preview: Ferzan Ozpetek's Saturno contro

 
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