Hadewijch (dir. Bruno Dumont, 2009)

One of the most commonly recognised virtues of film festivals is the ability to see heaps of films that will likely never be seen in your town again. The flipside is that, if you’re like me, watching 3-4 films a day can really bring out the fickleness in you. There’s less room for the considered attention and/or reflection that some of the more demanding films deserve (many of which won’t be seen even on inner city arthouse screens), and thus it’s the snap judgement that rules the day. All of which is a convoluted way of saying that after a weekend of thought, I’m disappointed that I initially tore a meager 2/5 rating on my voting slip of Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch, when after reflection it’s closer to a 3.5. It’s a curiously motivated, slightly cumbersome, but finally haunting film about young Catholic girl Celine, whose fall-in with two young Islamic Arab men after being expelled from her convent for her extreme displays of faith (“you confuse abstinence with martyrdom”, a nun tells her).

Dumont, for the record, is one of the most renowned provocateurs in contemporary world cinema, and has at made one of my favorite films ever with The Life of Jesus, a deeply moving portrait of inextricably linked ennui and racial prejudice amongst the youth of a small French town. Nothing he’s made since has had impressed me nearly as much (including controversial 1999 Palme D’or winner L’Humanite), although Twentynine Palms at least won me over with its sheer nutty audacity. His new film initially struck me as being glib, excessively humorless and abstruse will little purpose, despite Dumont’s expectedly painterly visual prowess and ability to find beauty in the mundane. But after a week of nearly a dozen films seen, it’s the one I’ve been least able to shake off*.

Whether Dumont has anything particularly insightful to say about religious fundamentalism now strikes me as irrelevant. What the film does best is reconciling opposite extremes, and finding parallels in the central united-by-faith relationship between Celine and Nassir. For instance, the interiors of the house of an affluent Parisian family are presented as alien-like as the Arab-populated outskirts of Paris, while two long musical sequences in which the Celine watches a rowdy outdoor rock show at night followed by a Chamber piece at church the next day, are afforded with the same reverence. It’s these repetitions and contrasts that accrue to give Hadewijch a surprising power, that culminates in a daring narrative turn.

After the relationship between Nassir and Celine is taken to its extremes, the film finally ends with an initially perplexing passage, which (if I’m interpreting it correctly) requires not so much a stretch of credibility but rather a leap of faith from the viewer, to snap us out of the passive state of watching a crisis of faith and make us actually experience that crisis, in our engagement with the film itself. Though I’m not entirely convinced with Hadewijch beyond its visual beauty and boldness, it’s a work of deeply sincere idiosyncrasy that clarifies a lot of what I ask for from cinema, more than most resoundingly successful films.

*I wrote this prior to seeing Uncle Boonmee, which I’ll review soon.