Of Gods and Men

Movie Review

‘Of Gods’ a spiritual journey to the unknown

March 18, 2011|By Ty Burr, Globe Staff

Lambert Wilson (left, with Adel Bencherif) plays Christian, the head of… (SONY CLASSICS PICTURES)

***½

OF GODS AND MEN

Directed by: Xavier Beauvois

Written by: Beauvois and Etienne Comar

Starring: Lambert Wilson, Michael Lonsdale

At: Kendall Square, West Newton

Running time: 122 minutes

Rated: PG-13 (a momentary scene of startling wartime violence, some disturbing images, brief language)

In French and Arabic, with subtitles

The air that “Of Gods and Men’’ breathes is so clean and so cold that it feels like a fresh beginning. The irony and the ecstasy of this beautifully shot, intensely affecting movie, however, is that the end is rapidly approaching for its characters, French Cistercian-Trappist monks caught up in the Algerian civil war of the 1990s. Xavier Beauvois’s film, a Grand Prix winner at Cannes last year, is a dramatic interpretation of actual events — some known, others guessed at — that could have been a foursquare tale of Christian martyrdom. Instead, it’s something stranger, deeper, and richer: an experience that takes us right up to the edge of human experience and peers into the unknown.

The monks have for years run a monastery-clinic in a mountain village, and the local Muslim villagers have come to rely on and love them. When “Of Gods and Men’’ opens, the area sits on the fault line between the guerrillas’ territory and government influence; a group of Croatian immigrant laborers is brutally murdered by Islamist rebels in one early scene. Both sides consider the brothers an active annoyance. Both sides, in fact, urge them to get the hell out. So why don’t they?

That debate — among the monks, within their souls, in the heads and hearts of the audience — unfolds during the first two-thirds of this exaltingly patient movie. The head of the monastery, Christian (Lambert Wilson, the Merovingian of the “Matrix’’ movies) is an austere man of spirit and intellect who studies the Koran and is fascinated with Islam — he wishes he could see it as God does. He announces to the local government minister that the monks won’t be going anywhere, which prompts a fiery response from some of the other brothers. “I didn’t come here to commit collective suicide,’’ insists the young Brother Christophe (Olivier Rabourdin).

Others are more circumspect. The aging Brother Luc runs the clinic and is the closest to the villagers; played by the great French character actor Michael Lonsdale, he’s the heart of the movie, a shambling old bear who has come too far to turn back. Brother Luc quotes Pascal at one point — “Men never do evil so cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction’’ — and he says it with no specific faith in mind and all of them.