What happens when two
people on life’s spiritual path find each other?
Terence Netter was raised in a Roman Catholic family knowing
that he ‘belonged in the Jesuits’. As someone mostly uninterested in coupling,
Therese Franzese grew up feeling like she didn’t fit in. Both were guided by a
desire to live a spiritual life, and neither imagined that romantic love would
upend their lifelong searches for meaning. The Spiritual Exercises follows
the story of Terence and Therese’s unlikely union, detailing how their
partnership developed, and what it meant to reconcile their romantic
relationship with their Catholic faith. Throughout the film, their story
unfolds within the framework of the Jesuit Christian meditations – prayers
aimed to ensure that no decision is made ‘under the influence of any inordinate
attachment’. But for Terence and Therese, love would become a force strong
enough to break the scaffolding on which two people had built their lives, and
ultimately shift their values and rewrite their futures.
In the film, Terence and Therese’s two narrative threads
slowly weave together. With craft and care, the American directors Lloyd Kramer
and Scott Chestnut cut between Therese and Terence’s parallel retellings of the
past until their stories play out in tandem. Bringing this rich narrative to
visual life, the directors draw on archive footage and photographs to paint a
picture of the cultural milieu of 1960s New York where the couple met. Film
clips from the Metropolitan Opera where Therese worked, images from Terence’s
art exhibitions, and black-and-white family portraits weave a tapestry of
memories. Throughout, the Catholic Church’s millennia-old celibacy requirement
for priests, which was reaffirmed by Pope Paul VI in 1967, lingers in
the background.
By asking what it means to leave your church for love, The
Spiritual Exercises grapples with themes beyond what it’s like to feel
at inextricable odds with a lifelong commitment to a religious order. Terence
and Therese’s difficult decisions about finding meaning in their lives invite
viewers to contemplate serendipity, the roads taken and those we chose to leave
behind, giving their relationship a universal resonance as they struggle to
make their undeniable love for one another fit into their lives. Through their
story, The Spiritual Exercises forms a gentle yet powerful
exploration of sacrifice, love and peace of mind – and the inherent tensions
between the three.
Written by Olivia Hains
The
spiritual exercises | Psyche Films
