General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Hail Mary (1985 film)

Hail Mary (French: Je vous salue, Marie) is a 1985 drama film directed, written, and co-produced by Jean-Luc Godard that retells the Annunciation and the virgin birth in a contemporary setting, with Mary as a basketball-playing student who works at her father's petrol station and Joseph as a taxi driver. A French, Swiss, and British co-production, it became one of the most protested films of the 1980s after Pope John Paul II publicly denounced it, yet it also received awards from religious juries at the Berlin Film Festival.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Je vous salue, Marie; directed, written, and co-produced by Jean-Luc Godard¹
Production	France, Switzerland, and United Kingdom, 1985; production companies included Sara Film, Pégase Films, JLG Films, Gaumont, Télévision Suisse-Romande, and Channel Four Films³
Principal cast	Myriem Roussel as Mary, Thierry Rode as Joseph, Philippe Lacoste as the Archangel Gabriel, with Juliette Binoche as Juliette⁴
French release	Visa 58066 dated 18 January 1985; CNC records a theatrical release date of 16 January 1985 and a duration of 80 minutes⁵
Papal denunciation	On 23 April 1985 Pope John Paul II said the film distorts and reviles the spiritual significance of the mother of Jesus²
Censorship	Banned in Brazil by President Jose Sarney in February 1986 after appeals from the country's Roman Catholic bishops; withdrawn from Italian theaters effective 2 June 1985⁶^•⁷
Awards	Protestant Church Jury Prize at the Berlinale; honorable mention from the International Catholic Film Organization at the 1985 Berlin festival⁸^•⁹

Spoilers

Story and approach

The film translates the Nativity into 1980s everyday life. Mary, the teenage daughter of a garage owner, becomes pregnant without having had sex, and Joseph, her taxi-driving boyfriend, must learn to accept the pregnancy and love her without touching her. The angel Gabriel schools Joseph in accepting the situation, while Mary comes to terms with God's plan through meditations that are sometimes angry and are punctuated by images of the sun, moon, clouds, flowers, and water. Godard intercuts a brief parallel story of Eva and her nameless lover, whose adulterous affair leads nowhere.¹^•⁸

The actress playing Mary appears nude in several scenes, and the dialogue includes profane language; these elements, together with the casting of a cab driver as Joseph, were the focus of the objections raised by religious protesters.¹⁰^•¹¹ The Film Fest Gent catalog describes the nude figure of the heroine as photographed chastely, without voyeurism, and frames the film's mystery as womanhood and birth in general.¹²

Production and credits

The film was photographed by Jacques Firmann and Jean-Bernard Menoud and edited by Anne-Marie Miéville, Godard's longtime collaborator and partner, who also shares the scenario credit on some listings.¹^•¹² The music draws on Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonín Dvořák, and John Coltrane.¹² Godard also made a 20-minute video notebook for the film, Notes on Hail Mary (Petites Notes à propos du film Je vous salue Marie, 1983).¹³

Reported running times differ across catalogs: the CNC records 80 minutes for the French visa,⁵ Cineuropa and the Film Society of Lincoln Center list 72 minutes,¹^•¹³ Gaumont lists 78 minutes,⁸ and the Harvard Film Archive screened a 103-minute print.¹⁴

In its initial theatrical distribution, all screenings were accompanied by The Book of Mary (Le livre de Marie), a roughly 25-to-27-minute short by Anne-Marie Miéville about a marriage breaking down as seen through the eyes of a young daughter; home-video releases have preserved this pairing.¹⁵

Controversy and censorship

The film was condemned before much of the public had seen it. In France, two lay Roman Catholic associations brought an emergency case arguing that scenes showing Mary naked with Joseph were deeply offensive; on 28 January 1985 a Paris court ruled that the film did not warrant censorship or banning.¹⁶ The presiding judge of Paris's superior court, having watched the film with attorneys for both sides, found it was not pornographic or even obscene. In Versailles, however, conservative Catholics forced their way into a theater and mutilated two reels, after which local authorities banned the film as a public-safety measure; the same Paris judge later reversed that ban on free-expression grounds.¹⁷ At the Cannes festival, Godard received a shaving-cream pie in the face from a seasoned protester.¹⁷

The Vatican intervention. On 23 April 1985 Pope John Paul II said the film distorts and reviles the spiritual significance of the mother of Jesus; a Vatican statement issued in his name said it "distorts and scorns" themes of the Christian faith.²^•¹⁸ In Italy, where nuns and priests had demonstrated outside a Rome cinema, magistrates in Pesaro and Rimini prohibited screenings, and the Italian distributor ordered the film withdrawn from theaters effective 2 June 1985 pending a ruling by a magistrate.⁷

Protest followed the film abroad. In Brazil, President Jose Sarney banned public showings in February 1986 in response to appeals from the country's Roman Catholic bishops, drawing criticism from Brazilian intellectuals who objected to censorship by an elected civilian government.⁶ In the United States, theaters in Boston and Philadelphia received bomb threats, several hundred demonstrators marched outside a Baltimore theater, and the film's Los Angeles opening was canceled after protests and moved to another theater; Archbishop Roger Mahony of Los Angeles objected in a November 21, 1985 statement to the juxtaposition of nudity and vulgarity with Mary, the Mother of God.¹⁸^•¹⁹ In Washington, D.C., the leading theater chains declined to book the film, which played instead at a small repertory house.¹¹

Reception and awards

Catholic film critics in the United States largely rejected the charge of blasphemy. Writing in the Jesuit weekly America, Father Richard A. Blake called it not a great film but argued that Godard was exploring the mystery of virginal conception and forcing audiences to confront the Incarnation as a sexual event; Michael Gallagher, while faulting the nudity and rough language, called Godard's meditation on the mingling of the divine and the human a pious one in Godard's own idiom.⁹ The International Catholic Film Organization gave the film an honorable mention at the 1985 Berlin festival, where it also received the Protestant Church Jury Prize.⁹^•⁸ Later assessments have been warmer: the Film Society of Lincoln Center called it "a glorious cinematic hymn, an attempt to reconcile spirit and flesh, science and nature," and Slant Magazine described it as "a profoundly felt, gravely beautiful work of faith."¹³^•²⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026