Sister Smile (M) *** 1/2

Cecile de France, Sandrine Blancke

Directed by Stijn Coninx

The title of this biopic of Jeannine Deckers, the Belgian nun who had a worldwide smash hit with the maddeningly infectious Dominique, couldn't be more ironic.

The song itself - part child-like chant celebrating the founder of her order, part folk song of the kind that was topping the charts in the era of Peter, Paul and Mary - still manages to brings a smile to this sinner's face.

Yet the story behind the song is an entirely miserable affair, a tragedy involving a self-involved publicity hog who would've flourished in the era of American Idol and a Catholic Church whose approach to human frailty is straight out of Dante's Inferno.

While the repeated performance of Dominique gives Sister Smile a certain camp value, what makes the movie so interesting is the complexity and difficulty of Deckers' character.

Swept up by the winds of change blowing across Europe in the early 1960s but still trapped by the religious dogma of her childhood, Deckers is a casualty of an era that was too often represented as a Dionysian explosion. This is a woman who, after leaving the Dominicans, outrages the Catholic Church with a song extolling the virtues of contraception (the charmingly titled Golden Pill) yet never seems to have come to terms with her homosexuality.

When we first meet Jeannine she's splashing through the mud playing soccer at a Catholic youth camp in the late 1950s, a strapping youngster (played by Cecile de France) whose aggression and hogging of the ball is a sign of things to come.

Jeannine is headstrong and defiant but doesn't have a clear idea about herself and the world. So she flees, as she does time and again (her trudging around with a suitcase becomes one of the film's recurring images). Ironically, she runs from her repressive household to the Dominicans, where she clashes with the mother superior over everything from the vow of silence to the food. Eventually Jeannine channels her overabundance of energy into playing guitar, singing and writing songs in order to bring the word of the Lord to the masses, eventually writing a sunny ditty about her order's founder, Saint Dominique.

The song becomes a worldwide smash but the Dominicans, while happy to take the money it brings in, will not allow Jeannine to bask in the publicity (she is dubbed Sister Smile and her back is shown on the record).

A frustrated Jeannine leaves but her lack of talent and the meddling of the Church undermine any chance that she will fulfil her dream of becoming the next Elvis Presley.

All of this might have been played for easy laughs but director Stijn Coninx and star Cecile de France do not attempt to depict Jeannine as cute or quirky or ahead of her time.

A far cry from the sunny sister played by Debbie Reynolds in The Singing Nun, this Jeannine is single-minded and selfish with a deep psychosexual hang-up that prevents her from ever really connecting at a physical level with her supposed lover Annie (Sandrine Blancke).

Cecile de France is superb as Jeannine Deckers, muffling her natural radiance to get deep inside the skin of this pitifully self-deluded woman, the ultimate one-hit wonder whose enemy is herself as much as the Church.

Deckers is perhaps too inconsequential a subject for Sister Smile to reach great heights. But Coninx and de France certainly get to the mixed-up, maddening humanity behind this curio of pop history.