The Milky Way 1969

Two French vagrants, Pierre Paul Frankeur and Jean Laurent Terzieff, set out from Paris to walk the traditional Way of St. James, aiming to reach Santiago de Compostela. Their trek begins along a roadside near Fontainebleau, where a caped clergyman tells them to sleep with a prostitute and to father children just as Hosea and Gomer did, a suggestion that lingers as a troubling theme throughout their journey. As they press on, the pair reach an inn where a police sergeant, a priest, and the cook debate the nature of the Eucharist and its transubstantiation, a discussion that spills over into the surreal when staff from a nearby mental hospital take away the priest.

That night they find shelter on a farm, while nearby a secret Priscillianist sect conducts a sexual rite, hinting at hidden doctrines and forbidden rites that weave through the travelers’ experiences. Their pilgrimage stalls between feast and famine: an expensive restaurant encounter becomes a meditation on faith, with the manager explaining the controversy surrounding Jesus’ divinity as discussed at the First Council of Nicaea. The journey then moves to a boarding school in Tours, where children perform for their families and teachers; a class recites heresies and proclaims them “anathema,” and one pilgrim somberly imagines anarchists executing the Pope, a vision that unsettles the travelers and tests their beliefs.

Near Bayonne, the trio attempts to hitch a ride; when a car refuses to stop, one of them curses it, only for a crash to claim the driver’s life. While examining the wreckage, they encounter a strange man—perhaps the Angel of Death or the Devil—who bestows one pilgrim with the dead man’s shoes, a small but chilling token on a journey already crowded with signs and portents. At a chapel along the route, they meet convulsionnaire nuns of the Jansenist tradition who nail one of their number to a cross, while a Jesuit and a Jansenist duel with swords, each side arguing about predestination and irresistible grace in a clash of faiths.

When the pilgrims finally reach Spain, they agree to look after a donkey for two men who later travel to an abbey to witness the desecration of a priest’s grave following the posthumous discovery of his writings about the Trinity. The two men declare that the Godhead is one person and manage to escape. In the forest, the two men swap clothes with two hunters swimming in a lake and even shoot at a rosary found in a pocket, a moment that heightens the sense of danger and religious mystery surrounding their voyage. That night, a vision of the Virgin Mary appears to the pair and returns the rosary, a miraculous interruption that deepens the sense of miracle and doubt.

Back at an inn, the trio recounts their recent visions to a local priest, who narrates another miracle in which the Virgin Mary takes on the form and duties of an errant nun for several years before returning to her convent, leaving the travelers to wonder about truth, faith, and divine interference. As they settle for the night, the discussion turns to the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception, the virgin birth, and the Assumption, a theological meditation that threads through every fevered moment of their pilgrimage.

On the outskirts of Santiago de Compostela, the two pilgrims encounter a prostitute who claims the city is empty of genuine pilgrims because the remains held there are those of Priscillian rather than St. James. She offers to become pregnant by them and recites the same names foretold by the caped man at the journey’s start, leading the trio into the woods to continue their intimate, uncertain quest. In a final, stark tableau nearby, two blind men encounter Jesus and his disciples; though Jesus heals their blindness, the men cannot fully understand what they see and persist in using their walking sticks, a quiet reminder of belief, sight, and the limits of faith on a road that never truly ends.