The Nun's Story

An adaptation of Kathryn Hulme's factually based bestseller about a Belgian girl, a surgeon's daughter whose dream always was to serve in the Congo as a nurse, and who later finds fulfilment doing just that as a missionary nun; but who simultaneously realises, forbidden by her vows to act on her attraction to Finch's handsome, agnostic doctor, that she is not by nature endowed with the self-denying humility that is the stuff of which nuns are made. Not as awful as you might expect, since the nun's training is shown in fascinating detail and the later doubts are quite subtly expressed. Solid performances, too, but it's still a long haul (made no lighter by Franz Waxman's abominably insistent score) for anyone not committed to theological problems of faith, conscience and obedience.