HADEWIJCH
Written & Directed by Bruno Dumont
Produced by Rachid Bouchareb & Muriel Merlin
Released by IFC Films
French with English subtitles
France. 120 min. Not Rated
With Julie Sokolowski, Yassine Salime & Karl Sarafidis
 

“I have forgiven Jesus for all of the love He placed in me, when there’s nothing I can do with this love,” Morrissey audaciously crooned on his 2004 album You Are the Quarry. Bruno Dumont is on a similar track here, taking us to Hadewijch, an obscure convent in the hills outside of Paris, and surveying the frustrations of one of the school’s heartsick, overly devoted students, 18-year-old Céline (newcomer Julie Sokolowski). In one early scene, she’s derided by the mother superior for starving herself as a part of a developing martyr complex and sent back home to her wealthy but emotionally absent parents. Céline, dejected, is unable to reconcile a spiritual love for God with her more earthly passions. Through her, Dumont poses an age-old, however complex, problem: how to be a spiritual person when one is definitively bound in flesh.

Morrissey and Dumont are not the first to wrestle with the dilemma. It’s a bit startling to me, though, to encounter this notion in modern culture when I wrongly assume we’re well beyond any “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” theological debates. Religious scholarship is an anachronism in my own life, and I quite appreciate when a current filmmaker or another artist reminds me of what trials the world’s billions of faithful weather each day.

Knowing his post-religious audience, Dumont is always diligent at infusing the story with the details of modern life, regardless of the time-honored themes (the school itself is probably named for Hadewijch of Antwerp, a 13^th-century poet and mystic). With a construction crew working outside Céline’s convent window as she prays, and even in the stitching of her designer jeans, we never feel too far from the present day. Similar films come to mind, but it’s rare for this particular material to make as much sense in a contemporary setting. Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), for instance, understands the passions of sheltered teenage girls, but he avoids the modern era altogether, while Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes (2009) takes a cynical, far less sympathetic, attitude toward religious devotion.

Dumont takes a risk here as well. Céline, finding herself back in Paris, befriends a group of young Muslim devotees and easily buys into their almost hip brand of fanaticism. It’s not such a far reach from Catholic devotion. Their discussions of violence and martyrdom in the name of God only fuel her own extremist fantasies and actually appear to her as a direct sign from Him. Dumont slowly allows us, along with Céline, access to what’s eventually revealed as a terrorist cell—an ideological one, at least—and without warning we’re in the thick of the kind of faith that weekly makes headlines. Dumont’s comparison sneaks up on us, and is it ever effective. He takes no moral stance—he’s saying only that the similarities between Christian and Muslim devotion (and fanatic devotion to anything, really) are a lot closer than most of us are probably willing to accept.

It’s hard to decide what the passions Céline actually experiences are. At first, it feels like love, yet as soon as violence is involved, her emotional state becomes murky. It’s a symptom of the conflict between human instinct and spiritual rationalization, for lack of better terms. The emotional cues offered up in modern life are far from straightforward, and the everyday is not an easy negotiation for Céline—or for that matter, anyone without a stable belief system in place that can reconcile heaven and earth. I suppose it’s safe to say Céline may be a unique character and a fanatic, sure, but her problems are probably not too far from our own. Michael Lee
December 20, 2010