SUCH are the vagaries of film distribution that Hadewijch (Cert. 12A) is only just released today in the UK. That is despite its having won the International Critics’ (FIPRESCI) Prize at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival.
This chronicling of a young postulant’s spiritual journey is worth the wait. Bruno Dumont, the director, began his adult life teaching philosophy before his first film The Life of Jesus. Since Hadewijch, Dumont has made Outside Satan (Hors Satan) which deals with the aftermath of a miracle. For a professedly unreligious person, Dumont cannot seem to leave the subject alone, not in order to refute it, but to savour its mysticism, which he feels that the cinema parallels.
Hadewijch, the name by which Céline (played by Julie Sokolowski) is known at the convent, was a 13th-century Christian mystic. The theology of John of Ruysbroeck (best known for The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love) was greatly influenced by her. Both these Flemish mystics explored Christian understandings of humility, suggesting that true selfhood emerges when we justly take pride in being made in God’s image.
Céline’s spiritual journey spends much of its time along the path of overzealous behaviour. Excessive abstinence, perceived by her superiors as an impious self-love, leads to her being sent back to the world, where there will be “more opportunities to show her love of God”.
Returned to her parents’ comfortable but sterile Parisian apartment, she soon takes up with the impetuous Yassine (Yassine Salime). The relationship vacillates between flirtation and companionship, Yassine only intermittently grasping that Céline has given herself to God.
On the other hand, his brother Nassir (Karl Sarafidis) is a devout Muslim who understands and respects this. He helps Céline see that a false pride demands of God some manifestation. At an Islamic discussion group, Nassir expounds on the presence and hiddenness of God in a manner not a million miles from Karl Barth’s Christian theology.
The upshot is that, in the spirit of her medieval namesake, Céline accepts that God is made known in proactive love. It turns out, however, that Nassir considers that the sweetest form of God’s love is in violence, one that leads them to visit an unnamed war zone before returning to France, where a bomb explodes at the Arc de Triomphe.
Stated so baldly, this fails to do justice to a subtle and elusive narrative. We do not know if the pair are responsible for this extremism any more than why there is a converging storyline about a young labourer who performs a redemptive act.
Céline bemoans the price Love appears to demand of her, and a false kind of pride — unlike that of the original Hadewijch — prevents her realising that God’s presence is already there, as it is within the whole created order. Only when she is seized by a love that will not let her go does the possibility present itself that the Way finds us rather than is found through our own often misguided searchings.