Those who love André Paul Guillaume Gide’s beautiful novella La Symphonie Pastorale will certainly enjoy Jean-Pierre Améris’s Maria’s Story, an elegant, intelligent, humanist study of a relationship between a nun and a 14-year-old deaf and blind girl. Like La Symphonie Pastorale, Maria’s Story is set in the 19th century in rural France. Like La Symphonie Pastorale, Maria’s Story is not long. Though the film has moments that are very raw and even brutal, and the actresses are far from glamorous, its camera always manages the capture the beauty of rustic simplicity.