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Bruno Dumont and HADEWIJCH: FICM 2009

Rafael Aviña

It was in 2009, during the seventh edition of the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM), when the controversial French filmmaker Bruno Dumont presented his film Hadewijch (2009), winner of the International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival that same year. In this film, Dumont returned to his themes of moral dilemmas, violence and sacrifice. A deeply religious and moving story that sought to portray human suffering and the faith twisted into a two-edged weapon.

Hadewijch of Antwerp was a mystic poetess of the 13th century, who died around the year 1260. A beguine (Catholic laywoman) dedicated to religious contemplation, charity work and the help of the homeless. Inspired by her devotion to Christ, she wrote her passionate verses and love poems, some of them of epistolary nature, which took as a starting point her mystical experiences. Hadewijch didn't write in Latin, but in vulgar language, that is to say, in her native Dutch; among her works are: El lenguaje del deso. Poemas de Hadewijch de Amberes, edited and translated into spanish by María Tabuyo, and Dios, amor y amante.

The story of Bruno Dumont is an exceptional one. Like the Austrian Michael Haneke (Funny Games, Caché, Amour), Dumont was previously a Philosophy professor and then made a delayed switch to cinema. Born in Bailleul, France, in 1958, he tried his luck in journalism, advertising and television. Later, he made countless short films and institutional documentaries, and from this experience emerged his first film, made at the age of 39: The Life of Jesus (1997), about a group of young boys wandering without direction, one of them having an epileptic seizure. With this film, he gained worldwide recognition and won the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. In Humanité (1999), a frightened man, officer Pharaon de Winter (Emmanuel Schotté), runs without a clear direction only to fall on a plowed field where the corpse of a girl lies with her vagina destroyed. Everything becomes enigmatic in this film that begins as a police investigation film to then take other more disturbing paths in the story of a policeman who looks for himself in the actions of others as a redemptive purge of human evils. The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes and a double award for best actor. Then, he moved to California to shoot Twentynine Palms (2003), a story of raw sexuality about a freelance photographer and a young woman who penetrates the Los Angeles desert to carry out an audacious photo shoot. Flandres (2006), also winner of the Grand Prix, portrays the provincial life of some young boys devastated by war. After Hadewijch, he made the controversial Outside Satan (2011), about the relationship between a lonely young man and a farm girl, followed by Camille Claudel 1915 (2013) inspired by a true episode about the French sculptor, sister of the poet and playwright Paul Claudel and lover of the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Starring Juliette Binoche, Dumont filmed it in an asylum surrounded by patients with real mental disabilities and he himself presented it at the 15th edition of FICM in 2013.

Céline (Julie Sokolowski) is a young novice in her twenties who decides to rename herself as Hadewijch, a religious name she takes in honor of the medieval nun and poetess. Céline confuses abstinence with martyrdom, as her constant acts of self-penance show.  Due to Céline’s excessive love for Christ and seeing her surrendered to a blind faith and excessive fervor, the Mother Superior forces her to leave the convent where she is living in confinement and decides to return her to secular society in the hope that she will be able to find herself. Back in Paris, Hadewijch returns to being Céline, who has taken her intention to become God's wife very seriously; Christ is the absent lover and she has remained a virgin to serve him. It is then when she meets two Muslim brothers: Yassine, an impulsive young man (Yassine Salihine) who likes to confront authority, and Nassir (Karl Sarafidis), the eldest, who leads a study group of Islamic faith, which will end up defining the loving sacrifice of Hadewijch, whose inner rage and existential crisis will lead her down dangerous paths, because Nassir is actually a terrorist who finds in her the ideal person to carry out his theories of extreme fanaticism.

Dumont returns to the grounds of The Life of Jesus to tell a dark tale of love, sacrifice and fanaticism, in which everyday details become terrible acts, about the dangers of obtuseness and passion, and he does so with a subtlety and an overwhelming force that leads to a shocking and desolate climax. Hadewijch takes on an enormous momentum in its last half hour when the protagonist decides to become a “soldier of Christ” and Nassir makes a proposal to her in his Islam class: “If you have faith, you must act. You must continue the work of the Creator.” Although even before that, the viewer has already witnessed small signs: the inner garden of the living area that seems to be a cross, or the advertisement with the word “eternity”.

The film is a disturbing moral reflection on the Christian faith as a model of life with echoes of: Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Alain Cavalier's Thérèse (1986) or Jean Luc Godard’s Hail Mary (1984), closing with an explosion and the return of Céline/Hadewijch to the convent where the novice is reunited with a sullen bricklayer who works inside the cloister. What's next? The audience will draw their own conclusions.

Translated by Adrik Díaz