Hadewijch (2009)
Country: FR
Technical: col/1.66:1 105m
Director: Bruno Dumont
Cast: Julie Sokolowski, Yassine Salime, Karl Sarafidis, David Dewaele
Synopsis:
Despite hailing from a ministerial family and residing in a palatial house on the Ile St Louis, a young theology student and postulant is denied a cloistered life by the mother superior, who deems that her self-mortifying behaviour smacks of vanity. Returned to the world and encouraged to take life's chances with both hands, she forms a friendship with a young Arab and his religious brother, who takes advantage of her frustrated knowledge of God by counselling radical political action.
Review:
Another of Dumont's lost souls and another Dardenne-style scrutiny of a non-professional actor (presumably) at close quarters. The film 'quotes' from Bresson quite heavily, not just in the unfinished performances and lapses of technique (an electric chip frier that is clearly not hot enough to fry anything), but in a Mouchette derived suicide attempt and lurches of continuity that transport the viewer cosmically rather than thematically: a barely sketched worker who is restoring the abbey is the ultimate instrument of God's grace. It is a study in faith that recalls Alain Cavalier's Thérèse and the obsessive debating of Melville's Léon Morin, prêtre, in which an atheistic woman inexplicably acquires sudden conviction in God's existence, or again Lourdes, where a relative lack of faith is nevertheless blessed with a miracle cure; French cinema has long had a fascination for theological conundrums. A deliberately executed film which persuades the persistent viewer with its forgiving approach to extremist tendency.
Country: FR
Technical: col/1.66:1 105m
Director: Bruno Dumont
Cast: Julie Sokolowski, Yassine Salime, Karl Sarafidis, David Dewaele
Synopsis:
Despite hailing from a ministerial family and residing in a palatial house on the Ile St Louis, a young theology student and postulant is denied a cloistered life by the mother superior, who deems that her self-mortifying behaviour smacks of vanity. Returned to the world and encouraged to take life's chances with both hands, she forms a friendship with a young Arab and his religious brother, who takes advantage of her frustrated knowledge of God by counselling radical political action.
Review:
Another of Dumont's lost souls and another Dardenne-style scrutiny of a non-professional actor (presumably) at close quarters. The film 'quotes' from Bresson quite heavily, not just in the unfinished performances and lapses of technique (an electric chip frier that is clearly not hot enough to fry anything), but in a Mouchette derived suicide attempt and lurches of continuity that transport the viewer cosmically rather than thematically: a barely sketched worker who is restoring the abbey is the ultimate instrument of God's grace. It is a study in faith that recalls Alain Cavalier's Thérèse and the obsessive debating of Melville's Léon Morin, prêtre, in which an atheistic woman inexplicably acquires sudden conviction in God's existence, or again Lourdes, where a relative lack of faith is nevertheless blessed with a miracle cure; French cinema has long had a fascination for theological conundrums. A deliberately executed film which persuades the persistent viewer with its forgiving approach to extremist tendency.
Country: FR
Technical: col/1.66:1 105m
Director: Bruno Dumont
Cast: Julie Sokolowski, Yassine Salime, Karl Sarafidis, David Dewaele
Synopsis:
Despite hailing from a ministerial family and residing in a palatial house on the Ile St Louis, a young theology student and postulant is denied a cloistered life by the mother superior, who deems that her self-mortifying behaviour smacks of vanity. Returned to the world and encouraged to take life's chances with both hands, she forms a friendship with a young Arab and his religious brother, who takes advantage of her frustrated knowledge of God by counselling radical political action.
Review:
Another of Dumont's lost souls and another Dardenne-style scrutiny of a non-professional actor (presumably) at close quarters. The film 'quotes' from Bresson quite heavily, not just in the unfinished performances and lapses of technique (an electric chip frier that is clearly not hot enough to fry anything), but in a Mouchette derived suicide attempt and lurches of continuity that transport the viewer cosmically rather than thematically: a barely sketched worker who is restoring the abbey is the ultimate instrument of God's grace. It is a study in faith that recalls Alain Cavalier's Thérèse and the obsessive debating of Melville's Léon Morin, prêtre, in which an atheistic woman inexplicably acquires sudden conviction in God's existence, or again Lourdes, where a relative lack of faith is nevertheless blessed with a miracle cure; French cinema has long had a fascination for theological conundrums. A deliberately executed film which persuades the persistent viewer with its forgiving approach to extremist tendency.