It’s still only March, but I don’t hope to see a better
movie this year than Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men
(Des hommes et des dieux), winner of the Grand — meaning
second — Prize at last year’s Cannes Festival. It tells
the true story of the Trappist Monks of
Notre-Dame de l’Atlas in Tibhirine, Algeria, whose little
monastery, a forlorn relic of the French imperial presence in that
country, was invaded and the monks kidnapped and later murdered by
Islamicist guerrillas in 1996. M. Beauvois does not sensationalize
their deaths, however, and he appears to have little interest in
the political conflicts within Algeria that led to them. This is no
accident. The historical Brother Christian (Lambert Wilson), the
prior of the Tibhirine monastic community, belonged to a French
military family and had himself served during the Algerian war.
Much might have been made of the fact, if the film had had a
political or historical or, indeed, a psychological point to make
instead of a religious one. As it is, however, its focus on the
piety, the goodness, the fellowship and the courage of the monks is
much more interesting and unusual and in my opinion could not but
have suffered from the introduction of a political
subtext.
At one point, it’s true, a secular Algerian official tells
Brother Christian that he blames the insurgency on French
colonialism (“that organized plunder”), which had ended more than
30 years earlier, but this comes across as self-serving, a mere
reflex on the part of one of many in post-colonial Africa who still
take comfort from having someone else, even someone else long ago,
to blame for their failures. The villagers who depend on the
monastery for medical care and material assistance are as
frightened of the government and the army as they are of the
guerrillas, and they desperately want the monks to stay among them.
“But without protection?” asks one of them.
“You are the protection,” says an Arab
woman.
“We are like birds on a branch,” says another monk —
birds who don’t know if they will fly away or stay on the
branch.
The same woman replies: “We are the birds; you
are the branch. If you leave, we lose our footing.”
Accordingly, the one guerrilla fighter to whom the film
introduces us, Ali Fayattia (Farid Larbi), is a complex and even
somewhat sympathetic character. We see him commit at least one
brutal murder — this is the only graphically disturbing scene in
the film — but at the same time he respects the monks and
recognizes the indispensable role they play in the lives of the
villagers. He even apologizes for disturbing the monastery’s
Christmas eve devotions when he and his men make a nocturnal visit
in search of medicine. He had been unaware of the significance of
the date to them, he says. It seems that Fayattia is protecting the
monks from some of his more brutal and, perhaps, fanatical
confreres who are only free to engage in the final terrorist
outrage once he is removed from the scene. As in real life, there
is no good political outcome of the war which rages around the
monks, but there is at least an imaginable human outcome implied by
the mutual tolerance issuing from the otherwise terrifying
confrontation of Ali Fayattia and Brother Christian.
The story of the Tibhirine monks themselves, however, is
the real heart of the picture, and it is told as an extended
allusion to the passion of Jesus Christ, including a healing
ministry, the odd miracle, a gratuitous political intervention, a
moment of doubt and a last supper — including bread and wine (and
a recording of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake”) — before the inevitable
martyrdom. Apart from Brother Christian, the most memorable of the
little community is its medic, Brother Luc (Michael Lonsdale) —
reminiscent of Luke the physician, supposed author of the Gospel of
Luke and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles — who has worn
himself out in the selfless service of the villagers of Tibhirine.
“I’m not afraid of death; I’m a free man,” he tells Brother
Christian. But it is the latter whose own fear, answering that of
the less saintly brothers, inspires him with the sympathy needed to
encourage them when they have to make the decision to remain where
there is so much danger and so much to be done or to go back to a
France that most of them left decades ago.
This story is punctuated with scenes of the monks’
devotions, their chants and prayers and readings that provide a
counterpoint to their worldly chores and fears. When they chant
that “God charges no soul save to its capacity” or one of their
readings throws up a sentence like “Weakness is not a virtue but a
fundamental reality” there is an instant resonance that helps us as
well as them to an understanding that their lives in this place and
this time are continuous with their deaths. “Dying here, now, does
it serve any purpose?” one of the monks asks Brother
Christian.
“Remember,” he replies: “you have already given your
life.”
I have written that there is no overt political purpose to
the picture, and that I think it is all the better for that, but
there are certainly political implications, if only of a negative
sort. Those who put their trust in political solutions to social
problems and political remedies for human misfortunes will find
naught for their comfort here. Once having decided to stay, the
atmosphere of constant fearfulness amidst the daily round of work
and prayer is made palpable and gives point as well as almost
unbearable pathos to the prayer of the doubter, Brother Christophe
(Olivier Rabourdin): “Help me! Don’t abandon me, please!” It is one
measure of Xavier Beauvois’s very considerable accomplishment in
Of Gods and Men that it is possible for the faithful to
believe Brother Christophe’s prayer was answered.
