There is a moment in this film when a great sacrifice is offered, the ultimate sacrifice of life and death and sex, and the martyr who offers it comes to think in her last breaths that her sacrifice has been in vain. That all that she had dared to offer was of no value, that no victory had been achieved, no miracle was forthcoming. She dies in doubt, disillusionment, and deeply afraid.
And like so much of the rest of this movie, the beautiful and harrowing truth is that this compassionate and loving woman is wrong to doubt herself and her paradigm of belief... though we, the cultured and comfortably secular audience, have doubted her and her bizarre religiosity all along. Her sacrifice does prevail, the miracle does happen, the glory of giving is upheld and sanctified. The bells of heaven ring to praise her life, but she is not here to hear them.
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