The Stream

Fresh and forceful: Mother Teresa & Me offers a new look at an iconic saint.

Mother Teresa & Me, a new film, uses a fresh narrative frame to tell a powerful story about Mother Teresa, the famous saint of Calcutta. Teresa is such an iconic figure that she is hard to dramatize in art. Director and writer Kamal Musale solves this by making Mother Teresa & Me the story of two women—not just one.

Mother Teresa & Me portrays both Mother Teresa’s early years in India and the parallel story of Kavita, a young British violinist in the present day. By cutting back and forth between the two strands, the film achieves something that would otherwise be missing: suspense. Instead of merely watching yet another documentary about Mother Teresa, the audience wonders: Why are these two stories being told together? Little by little the answers emerge. The two women share similar traits—pride, perseverance, independent thinking, and a desire to do something great with their lives. Yet while Kavita is focused on herself, her relationship, and her career, Teresa aims for heaven.

Framing a parallel plot—two women, not just one

While Kavita makes music in modern, secular Britain, Mother Teresa navigates the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church as she feels called to help the poor and the dying and to teach poor girls in India. Kavita is a successful classical musician with a boyfriend. They are not married, and she is surprised to discover that she is pregnant. Her boyfriend pressures her to have an abortion. Instead, she travels to Calcutta (Kolkata), her parents’ birthplace, which she hasn’t visited since childhood. This is not a simple hagiography of Mother Teresa, but closer to a mystery film. Kavita—the embodiment of an educated, modern, liberal woman—goes to a place she considers a religious and cultural backwater. At the request of Deepali, a family friend who was adopted by Mother Teresa, Kavita visits Teresa’s mission, Nirmal Hriday. The experience changes Kavita’s life.

Honest and sympathetic character portrayals

What’s refreshing about Mother Teresa & Me is not only its narrative structure but also how sympathetically and truthfully it treats its characters. It would have been easy to render Kavita as a cardboard cutout—an egotistical feminist, atheist, and an artist who despises Christianity. But Banita Sandhu (in her second film after Shoojit Sircar’s October) plays Kavita as an intelligent and sensitive violinist. She is worldly and hesitant to engage with India and spiritual ideas, but not harsh or self-absorbed. She is thoroughly modern yet has a conscience. She is visibly tormented and uncertain as her boyfriend Paul— even while she is in Calcutta—leaves messages on her phone pressuring her to abort. Kavita remembers something Mother Teresa told her when she was a small child living in India: “God gave you your life. What you do with your life is your gift to Him.” Even so, she repeats the secular maxim: “It’s a woman’s body—she can do what she wants with it.”

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But Kavita’s biological mother Aparna (the excellent Shobu Kapoor) and her spiritual mother (Teresa) gradually draw out the goodness of life and the sanctity of children. The film does not shy away from the poverty and religious tensions in India. When a man tries to drive Teresa away because “she wants to convert us,” his wife calls him “a lazy drunk” and points out that Teresa—not he—is bringing money into Calcutta and teaching the children to read. Mother Teresa & Me is also honest about Catholic bureaucracy, which initially rebuffed Teresa. A priest slams the church door in her face and tells Teresa—already wearing the white Saree that would later become iconic—to “take off that ridiculous uniform.”

Receiving grace

Jacqueline Fritschi-Cornaz is wonderful as Mother Teresa, striking precisely the balance between gentle submission to the authorities of the Vatican and to God, and an iron will. Especially powerful is the scene in which a desperate Teresa—nearly broken by the failure of her plans and the omnipresent poverty and suffering—cries out to God. In that moment she is not a “saint,” but—like all of us—a human being who at times struggles in bewilderment with the ways of the Lord.

In the end, God of course speaks to Mother Teresa and removes the obstacles that had hindered her life’s work. Kavita cannot help but absorb some of this grace. She chooses life, and the brief, understated scene—only a few seconds—where she leaves Paul a message carries enormous moral weight. “I thought you cared about me,” Kavita says quietly into the phone. She does not shout but appears serenely justified—for she has found a truly loving and unshakable foundation for her life.

Mark Judge is a writer and filmmaker in Washington, D.C. His new book is The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi.