Milagro en Roma (1988)

User Rating:

6.2/10   

Director:

Lisandro Duque Naranjo

Writers:

Lisandro Duque Naranjo (writer)
Gabriel García Márquez (writer)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

A man's seven-year-old daughter dies and his grief is overwhelming. After twelve years he finds the...

Plot Keywords:

Saint | Miracle | Religion | Political

Cast

Frank Ramírez	...	Margarito Duarte
Gerardo Arellano
Amalia Duque García
Santiago García
Lisandro Duque Naranjo
Enrique Buenaventura
Daniel Priolett

Also Known As:

Miracle in Rome

Runtime:

90 min

Country:

Colombia

Language:

Spanish

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

Elisa Cinematográfica

A touching miracle

"Milagro en Roma" is one of the sweetest, most touching love stories I've ever seen on film. It is throughout a seamless weave of tragedy, comedy, miracle and earth-bound ordinariness. The story of a man whose little daughter suddenly and inexplicably dies, and is disinterred years later, to be found completely uncorrupted, manages to treat seriously the grief of the father while surrounding it with a sharp-edged satirical comedy on religion and human motivation. The scene at the graveyard, where the "miracle" of the little girl's preservation is first discovered, is a masterpiece of grotesque comedy. The pushing, modern, money-hungry new young priest of the parish has sold off the cemetary to a developer who (for a price) is willing to rebury the dead in a new, improved, modern graveyard, and the scene is a hellish nightmare of poor people digging up and hauling away the remains of their relatives rather than have them dumped in an unmarked pit. Finding no help from the local clergy, the father takes his little girl's body to Rome, to appeal to the Pope to have her declared a saint. In another grotesque touch, he carries her around in a specially-built suitcase, rather like a large trombone case. In Rome, he is given the runaround, cheated, exploited and abused, and is finally on the verge of being arrested, when the miracle of the title takes place. I liked the way at this point the supernatural touches the natural, sidestepping the clumsy apparatus of the church and working directly. The movie does not try to explain how such things can happen, they just do, and it leaves us happy, but still holding a mystery.