Film Review — Cabrini
A lavishly mounted tribute to Italian nun Francesca Saverio Cabrini, whose charity work led to her canonisation as America’s first saint
Mother Cabrini aka Francesca Saverio Cabrini is the subject of Alejandro Monteverde’s hagiographical drama about the titular Italian nun. A pioneering charity worker of the Catholic church, Cabrini was the first American to obtain sainthood by the Vatican, and on the evidence presented in this handsomely mounted film, with good reason. Cabrini’s work with orphans in the notorious Five Points area of New York, circa late nineteenth century, is the primary narrative focus, and her clashes with institutionally sexist male clergy provide the principal dramatic fireworks.
The film opens with an appropriately upsetting sequence of child Italian immigrant Paolo (Federico Ielapi) desperately wheeling his sick mother to a hospital. The staff don’t speak Italian, and he is sent packing by a police officer. Paolo’s mother promptly dies of typhus, and Paolo winds up in a street gang.
Afterwards, we join Cabrini (Cristiana Dell’Anna) who persuades Pope Leo XIII (Giancarlo Giannini) to allow the church’s first-ever female-led mission work. Cabrini wants to start in China and move west, but the Pope insists she start in the west and work east…
