User Reviews

The bereaved father who's lost his seven year old daughter, upon visiting her grave twelve years later, finds his daughter's body perfectly preserved - just as he had left it. His fellow townspeople call the event a miracle but the town bishop wants the child reburied. The father must fight his way through political and religious obstacles to have his daughter declared a first Colombian Saint.

Undying father's love and devotion for his innocence child that perform miracles in Roma - that's what this screen adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story "La Santa" is about. Moving and heartwarming, darkly comical and satirical, the movie is simple and profound in the same time.

7.5/10

"Milagro en Roma" is one of the sweetest, most touching love stories I've ever seen on film. It is throughout a seamless weave of tragedy, comedy, miracle and earth-bound ordinariness. The story of a man whose little daughter suddenly and inexplicably dies, and is disinterred years later, to be found completely uncorrupted, manages to treat seriously the grief of the father while surrounding it with a sharp-edged satirical comedy on religion and human motivation. The scene at the graveyard, where the "miracle" of the little girl's preservation is first discovered, is a masterpiece of grotesque comedy. The pushing, modern, money-hungry new young priest of the parish has sold off the cemetary to a developer who (for a price) is willing to rebury the dead in a new, improved, modern graveyard, and the scene is a hellish nightmare of poor people digging up and hauling away the remains of their relatives rather than have them dumped in an unmarked pit. Finding no help from the local clergy, the father takes his little girl's body to Rome, to appeal to the Pope to have her declared a saint. In another grotesque touch, he carries her around in a specially-built suitcase, rather like a large trombone case. In Rome, he is given the runaround, cheated, exploited and abused, and is finally on the verge of being arrested, when the miracle of the title takes place. I liked the way at this point the supernatural touches the natural, sidestepping the clumsy apparatus of the church and working directly. The movie does not try to explain how such things can happen, they just do, and it leaves us happy, but still holding a mystery.

I don't like numbers: movies have too many aspects to condense to a scalar.

I saw this movie on PBS one evening when I expected nothing of it, a movie from Colombia about a poor man who tries to get the Church to canonize his dead daughter. I never heard of the actors or the director nor seen them before or since. They adeptly finessed the temptations to maudlin sentimentality and a diatribe against the Church or bureaucracy in general. I found the representation of the Church farcical, not diabolical: they're just human too. How would I react to a modest rural man with a corpse still fresh after twelve years? It is a marvelous modest masterpiece that has my favorite virtue of not trying to be grander than the story deserves.

I strongly recommend the source story, 'The Saint', collected in 'Strange Pilgrims' by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. I just read it, which inspired me to look the movie up on IMDb. It casts a whole new twist on the story.

I loved the film and agree with its accusations of the Christian religion. It raises the question of what essential values remain when we see our churches operating like businesses. One of the things I liked most about this picture is how simple the story is; yet its message is profound and thought provoking.

I recall watching this film on TV. I didn't know anything about García M's novel, but the story is fiercely gripping. I remember it hitting me hard, and I was totally in awe at how simple the style of the film was. This thing is barely known, but I really recommend you watch it if given the chance. The ending is quite surprising, and it's got so much raw emotion you will almost feel moved to tears. I'd love to get the chance to see it again, but in the same fashion of Photographing Fairies, it seems there's no DVD version of it. So I guess you should catch in on the TV. The sequences with the father walking down Vatican City are beautiful and sad. I feel can't praise this movie enough, you should experience it.

I watched this movie at a kid, here I am 30 years later searching for the title of the movie, so glad I've finally found it. Such a great movie.

I agree with most of the other comments and, with the present headlines concerning the Church, one can see the same hypocrisy operating at full strength. I think, also, that real "saintly" people are not always what one expects. I thought the ending was perfect and I thought the music (the Hallelujah Chorus?) made an appropriate ironic effect. I give it a 10.

The movie "Milagro en Roma" is a Spanish-language movie adapted from a short story named "La Santa" by Colombian author Gabriel García Marquéz. The movie was directed in 1988 by Lisandro Duque Naranjo. The main objective of the movie is to show the distance between institutions and the common people. The movie succeeds at this in many aspects. However, it is the satire and dark comedy which makes this movie worth watching.

As for the plot of the movie, it centers around the mysterious death of a man's young child. Twelve years after her death, the man must dig up the remains of the child in order to prevent them from being placed in a mass grave after the parish constructs a new cemetary. Upon doing this, the man finds his daughter to be completely preserved. It is big news in the small town and people seem to think perhaps the girl is the first-ever Colombian saint. The local clergy arrives in order to analyze the situation, but nothing comes of it. The man eventually goes to Rome in order to further look into the matter of having his daughter canonized. However, he is routinely ignored and entangled in the bureaucratic spiderweb of the ever-powerful Catholic Church. Despite all of this, his efforts do not go to waste, and we the viewer find out who the true saint is in this heartwarming story.

I found the movie to be good, but nothing spectacular. It succeeds on many levels, with the combination of heartache, frustration, sadness, yet humor as well. I would recommend the movie, especially if one has read the short story "La Santa" by García Marquéz. The ending somewhat undermined some of the themes developed throughout the movie, but I do not think that it ruined the movie. It is still a lovable movie that many can enjoy.