L'Appel du silence (1936)
Directed by Léon Poirier

Film Review

Léon Poirier's portrait of the French Sahara missionary Charles de Foucauld is a sombre and brooding affair that is perhaps too respectful of its subject to provide any deep insights into his inordinately complex and elusive personality.  The life of de Foucauld can be summarised in a sentence - having failed as a French officer in his youth because of his wayward temperament, he had a regious conversion in his mid-twenties and thereafter led a saintly hermit-like existence in the Sahara before being shot dead by armed bandits.  The film adds very little flesh to this skeleton narrative, and as a result it struggles to fill its feature-length runtime, although there are a few powerful moments along the way.

If Poirier is remembered at all today, it is most likely for his remarkable documentary Verdun: visions d'histoire (1928), one of cinema's starkest and most informative accounts of the First World War.  L'Appel du silence likewise has some striking visuals, in particular the location sequences set in the Sahara Desert, which have a haunting beauty of the kind that might well take a man prisoner all his life, as in fact happened to de Foucauld.  It was in the sandy wasteland of the Sahara that Charles de Foucauld felt closest to his God and it is in its evocation of the missionary's unbreakable ties to the desert that the film is most successful.

Here, de Foucauld is portrayed humanely, but with not much in the way of depth, by the charismatic Rumanian-born actor Jean Yonnel, who was often cast in exotic roles, in such films as Fyodor Otsep's Amok (1934) and Jean Dreville's Les Nuits blanches de Saint-Pétersbourg (1938).  Yonnel's inexpressive performance preserves the mystique of the character he portrays, somewhat to the detriment of the film if you are expecting a deeper insight into de Foucauld's character.  Even for those who not religiously minded, L'Appel du silence is a strangely beguiling film - by no means a masterpiece, but an effective expression of a man's religious awakening and spiritual fulfilment through faith.  This was one of the first films to receive the Grand prix du cinéma français (in 1936), a forerunner of the Césars.

Film Synopsis

In his early twenties, Charles de Foucauld brings disgrace upon himself when, as an officer in the French Army, he insists on taking a woman to live with him whilst he is posted in North Africa.  On his return to France in 1886, de Foucauld experiences a strong religious awakening which drives him towards a solitary life of prayer and contemplation.  After being ordained at the age of 43, he returns to the Sahara and lives almost as a hermit before he chooses to join the Tuareg, a nomadic desert people in the south of Algeria.  For the next ten years, de Foucauld forges a close bond with the Tuareg, but his life ends abruptly and tragically when, in 1916, armed rebels drag him from his fort and shoot him dead.