Hadewijch (2009) - film review

A mother superior is so shocked by the manic faith of one of her novices that she has no choice but to expel her from the convent.  Rejoining the outside world, Céline makes an attempt to fashion herself as an ordinary Parisian girl.  However, her obsessive devotion to God and a meeting with Arab brothers Yassine and Nassir soon lead her down a very dangerous path...

Director Bruno Dumont is no stranger to controversy.  Having ruffled feathers on several continents with his highly idiosyncratic and provocative brand of auteur cinema which often depicts human beings with a shocking savagery, he risks further alienation with his latest film, in which he makes an uncompromising connection between Christian devotion and Islamic fanaticism.  Dumont’s films all deal with human perversions of one kind or another and Hadewijch, his fifth and most topical film to date, is no exception.  This is a film which confronts head-on the perversity of obsessive religiosity, possibly the most dangerous, most prevalent perversion of them all.

The film takes its title from the name of a 13th Century poet and mystic, Hadewijch of Antwerp, whose spirit appears to have been incarnated as the film’s main protagonist, a fragile modern day adolescent named Céline.  The latter’s longing for the absolute consumes her to the extent that she withdraws totally and subjects herself to physical and emotional pain in an attempt to prove that she is a worthy bride of Christ.  Even the Catholic nuns who lodge her find her a scary proposition and have no option but to send her back into the real world.  It is in the real world that Céline’s devotion takes a turn for the sinister.   With only the most tenuous grip on reality, she rejects true love when it is sincerely offered to her by one man and instead falls under the spell of an Islamist who sees her as an easy recruit to jihad.  Although Céline’s rapid conversion from self-mortifying Christian to wannabe terrorist is not entirely convincing, the film does offer a sobering reminder of the ease with which religious devotion can be perverted for evil ends.  

Dumont’s own personal aversion to religion becomes glaringly apparent when we get to the part of the film in which Islamic fundamentalism rears its ugly head.  However, religious antipathy does not prevent the director from engaging with his heroine and portraying her in a compassionate and realistic light.   Céline is not, as is sometimes the case in Dumont’s films, a hollow two-dimensional representation of an idea, but a fully formed human being that we can sympathise with.   In a remarkable acting debut, Julie Sokolowski subtly exposes the soul of a young woman who is so totally overwhelmed by her love of the Divine that she is incapable of forming any attachment to the physical world that surrounds her.  It is a remarkable portrayal of innocence and devotion, one that simultaneously conveys the tragic vulnerability of Robert Bresson’s Mouchette and the unshakeable conviction of Carl Dreyer’s Joan of Arc.

Sokolowski has such a powerful screen presence that she completely monopolises our attention.  The other characters are, almost without exception, cast into the shadows and make very little impression.  One of the shortcomings of this film is that Dumont invests so much in his central protagonist that few of the others fail to be more than thinly sketched stereotypes.  The one exception is Yassine, the likeable young Arab man who attempts unsuccessfully to draw Céline into the romance that might have been her salvation.  Yassine’s frustration reveals a humanity and love of life that Céline appears to have long surrendered in her quest for the absolute.  That Céline is ultimately redeemed is at least partly down to Yassine’s influence, such is the inviolable power of human love.

Dumont’s austere visual style and sparse mise en scène are perfectly suited for the subject of this contemplative drama, the slow pace and minimalist composition making it easy for the spectator to be drawn into Céline’s complex inner world and gain an insight into her troubled psychology and intense spiritual yearning.  The only sin that Dumont commits is attempting to weave in a secondary narrative strand that seems to have no connection whatever with the main storyline (the confluence does occur, but only right at the end of the film in a truly baffling coda).  This gratuitous narrative hopping serves no real purpose and merely provides an unwelcome distraction from what is an otherwise gripping account of delusion, corruption and redemption.  Just as Dumont’s previous film Flandres offered a timely reflection on the futility and barbarity of war, so Hadewijch eloquently engages with another major theme of our time, the insidious threat of religious fanaticism.

© James Travers 2010

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