Gilles Carle touches on high comedy, serious commentary, and near tragedy in what he calls a "religious Western." Bernadette is a big-city housewife who ditches her lawyer husband and stiflingly comfortable Montreal life to take up residence in a dilapidated old farmhouse in the country. There she becomes mother and whore to the local misfits, and utilizes her healing powers to effect what the community views as miracles, making Bernadette a saint. Their religious fires are fanned by a consumerism which quickly turns a pilgrimage into an ugly shootout. Carle skillfully illuminates as he peels them away the layers of frustration and claustrophobia to which Bernadette the housewife had become inured. But the personality that emerges is one full of contradictions; Micheline Lanctot gives a virtuoso performance in a role the true nature of which remains necessarily undefined.