"Somehow I think we need faith, or I need faith, or I'm lacking in faith. Therefore maybe I needed a story which is bigger than myself." (Godard). Condemned even before its opening, Hail Mary is ironically a beautiful cinematic hymn. "Godard evokes the serious through a comic mode, enticing solemnity with a chained camera, a steady, austere procession of beautiful paintings (images) seeking the soul in faces, reflections; a woman who must lend herself to no one, who is condemned from seeing love, her desire (in flesh), and discovers, perhaps as Vivre sa vie's Nana did in her tears, that the soul is not imprisoned in the body, but the body within a soul" (Ryan DeRosa).