By Anthony Barich
It’s rare, if ever, that a secular film glories – and rests solely – in the music of hymns and Psalms.
For this reason and many more, Of Gods and Men – based on the book The Monks of Tibhirine, the true story of monks who were brutally executed during the political nightmare that unfolded in Algeria during the 1990s – is a treasure to behold.
The impending (unseen) decapitation of seven French Trappists kidnapped from their monastery in the village of Tibhirine provides the thread for this real life drama of sacrificial love; of Christians who put their lives at risk for their Muslim friends, and Muslims who risked death for Christians.
The film’s producers had a special ‘monastic advisor,’ Henry Quinson, who himself joined the monastery of Tamié, Savoy (France), where he completed his novitiate before studying theology at the Catholic University of Strasbourg.
Quinson said the chants first allow us to see and hear the monastic community during its most frequent and regular activity: the seven daily offices, in other words, four hours of singing a day.
Like Philip Gröning’s 2005 silent documentary Into Great Silence, Of Gods and Men is slow and patient in that it allows the monks’ daily work to speak for itself, along with the chants, which give rhythm to the story.
But it is the chants which express the monks’ questions, their fears and their faith, as they relate directly to the increasingly serious events that are shaking the monastery and the region, Quinson said.
The monks’ fears of the looming evil are vividly portrayed in Psalms which prove strangely prophetic:
The enemy persecutes my soul
He has smitten my life to the ground
He has made me dwell in darkness
with those long dead
My spirit grows faint within me
My heart within me, dismayed (Psalm 142).
By the end of the film, Quinson says, the monks’ choir is “the heart of God”.
“The songs give God words, and God gives His Spirit of communion and peaceful resistance to the monks who are caught up in the turmoil of an increasingly menacing and problematic violence,” Quinson said.
It is the monks’ chant that speaks most powerfully.
Almost every five minutes, the monks are back in their chapel, singing and chanting from their Breviary or the Psalms what reflects their current state of mind, petitioning to God. Some are questioning the point of being slaughtered along with others in the village, some are on surer ground, confident that their calling is to serve the villagers in love of them, each other and of God.
The chants also help make Beauvois’ Of Gods and Men – screening at Cinema Paradiso in Northbridge from 26 May – a catechism on the Catholic understanding of suffering, the dignity of work and the virtue of charity, humility, patience and obedience.
That’s quite a call for a secular film that won the Grand Prix – effectively second place – at the 63rd Cannes Film Festival last year.
More than that, it has made Catholicism, or at least monastic life, ‘cool’. Beauvois has found cinematic ways to convey the collective power of belief and the manifestation of all-encompassing love, as SBS online’s Lisa Nesselson noted.
Psalms and chants are prominent, but this is no Into Great Silence.
Of Gods and Men makes these aspects of Catholic faith more accessible for the non-religious and gives them greater resonance, as their charity shines through their interaction with the Muslim villagers and their dealings with each other, especially in the face of certain death.
“Remember – you have already given your life to God!” the monastery’s Superior, Br Christian, played with fervour by Lambert Wilson (the annoying and arrogant Frenchman, The Merovingian ,on the Washowski brothers’ Hollywood blockbusters Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions), tells a petrified young monk who feels alone as his prayers for inner peace appear to go unanswered.
Nesselson noted that the monks’ actions show that “if violent Islamic radicals are terrorising the local population and unsubtly suggesting that the Christian brothers clear out, the monks reason that the biggest risk is not to life and limb but to heart and soul”.
“The members of the Religious community examine their consciences with exemplary courage and act accordingly.
“What becomes of a life of contemplation when you’re forced to ‘contemplate’ the violent incursion of radical fundamentalists?” This inner turmoil is a constant theme, and the moment each declares their individual decision is a climax (there’s another involving Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake later on) of the film that is as powerful in its cause for jubilation as Darth Vader deciding good over evil and throwing the Emperor down the reactor shaft to save his son Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi, if you’ll forgive the crass parallel.
Though Of Gods and Men is a slow two hours, it identifies the viewer with each individual monk’s plight so intimately through their prayers and interactions that anyone with a heartbeat is willing to stick around and watch how they find their salvation amidst the violence in tending to the community and carrying out their daily tasks of gardening, cooking, etc, while waiting for the insurgents or the government army to come in and wipe them out.
For the threat comes not from just the insurgents but from the government troops who are suspicious that because the monks also nursed some terrorists back to health – their charity is not exclusive to the innocent – they may be complicit with the insurgents.
Indeed, the Trappists’ upright Superior Br Christian chastises an army general for parading a captured insurgent through the streets in triumphalism.
In a particularly chilling moment while an army helicopter whirrs above the monastery appearing to take aim at it, the monks band together, arms over each other’s shoulders, chanting:
The shadows, for you are not shadows
For you, night is as clear as day.
In doing so, the monastic community shows a mystical and disarmed hope.
Such is the hope in their similarly disarmed Saviour, Jesus Christ, who gave witness to the ultimate act of love that parallels the final consequences of these heroic monks.
Screening times at Cinema Paradiso
Of Gods and Men is showing daily at Cinema Paradiso, 164 James Street, Northbridge from Thursday, 26 May to Wednesday, 1 June at 10.45am, 1.30pm, 4pm, 6.30pm and 9pm.
Cinema Paradiso will screen the film for a minimum of four weeks.
For session times past Wednesday, 1 June (available each Monday), readers can visit www.lunapalace.com.au.
The amount of time fit screens for may be extended depending on how popular it is.