Hadewijch

Hadewijch (Director: Bruno Dumont): In this, his fifth fea­ture film, Bruno Dumont has cre­ated some­thing as mys­ter­ious and beau­tiful as his prot­ag­onist. We meet young Celine in a con­vent, where she is hoping to take her vows as a nun. But her refusal to eat and other acts of self-denial worry the Mother Superior, who turns her out into the world, hoping to rid her of what she con­siders “self-love.” Though she lives with her wealthy par­ents in the centre of Paris, they’re dis­tant and there’s some sug­ges­tion of buried issues with her father.

One day she meets some boys in a café, who are amazed at her trusting nature. Yassine takes a spe­cial liking to her, although she rebuffs his romantic advances, claiming she only has love for Christ. The young Muslim is befuddled but still besotted, so he con­tinues their friend­ship. Eventually she visits the home he shares with his brother Nassir in the housing pro­jects out­side the city. Nassir is a “ser­ious” Muslim, according to Yassine, and he thinks they’ll hit it off. He has no idea.

Nassir recog­nizes the fire that burns in Celine’s heart, and though their reli­gions are dif­ferent, their pas­sion is the same. Over time, he con­vinces Celine that God is not only about love, but about justice as well. Soon after that, he takes her to Lebanon to show her the injustice he finds there. Dumont patiently lays the ground­work for a stun­ning climax that shows just how easily love can turn to violence.

Meanwhile, in a par­allel plot, we follow David, a petty crim­inal working in con­struc­tion at the con­vent. He breaks his parole and is sent back to jail for a few months. It’s not clear what his pur­pose is until the final scene, in which the two lives stand in stark con­trast to each other. Celine lives in extremes, reaching for holi­ness and finding tragedy. David is an everyman, flawed but more cap­able of love than Celine could ever be. The inter­sec­tion of their lives leads to a power­fully moving ending.

Dumont put his faith in non-professional Julie Sokolowski to play Celine, and the decision pays off. She por­trays her dis­con­nec­tion from the world nat­ur­ally, even as she radi­ates a for­bidden sexu­ality. Her purity attracts men, but she only has eyes for Christ, and her obses­sion verges on the sexual. Her prayers are painful, expressing her yearning to be with Christ even as she protests his absence. She longs for the ecstasy and obli­vion of union with God, and the con­nec­tion with some of the rhet­oric of Islamic ter­rorism couldn’t be more clear.

This is the first of Dumont’s films I’ve seen, and I’m cap­tiv­ated by his intel­li­gence and will­ing­ness to explore such interior issues as reli­gious faith and obses­sion. In the post-screening Q&A, he revealed that Hadewijch was a real mystic from the Middle Ages, and his explor­a­tion of what a modern example would look like in a world filled with polit­ical action makes for one smart and haunting film.

Official site of the film (en francais)

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Bruno Dumont from after the screening:

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Duration: 27:10

(9/10)

Tagged as: #tiff09, christianity, faith, france, fundamentalism, islam, religion