Film: Of Gods And Men
Release date: 11th April 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 121 mins
Director: Xavier Beauvois
Starring: Lambert Wilson, Michael Lonsdale, Olivier Rabourdin, Philippe Laudenbach, Jacques Herlin
Genre: Drama
Studio: Artificial Eye
Format: DVD & Blu-ray
Country: France
A huge critical success, Of Gods And Men tells the story of the French Roman Catholic monks tragically caught up in the Algerian Civil War in the mid-90s. The film is the product of a collaboration between Etienne Comar, a French Catholic who wrote and produced, and director Xavier Beauvois, whose interesting oeuvre thus far includes the dramas Don't Forget You're Going To Die (1995), The Young Lieutenant (2005) and Villa Amalia (2009).
Mirroring the solemn and repetitive nature of a life given over entirely to religious worship and self-sacrifice, the film’s slight and slow narrative follows a group of French monks in their day to day activities in a small Algerian village. Their stoic, peaceful and altruistic existence is thrown into turmoil by the civil war, and their involvement with a group of Muslim rebels located in the mountains nearby.
The monks, led by the excellently reserved Lambert Wilson, are forced to help an injured rebel, and are unwittingly thrown into the middle of the region’s war-time tensions. As inevitable tragedy creeps toward them, passionate disagreements erupt, and the group must decide between their faith and self-preservation…
Of Gods And Men focuses very acutely on the experiences of its French monks – not in itself a bad thing – but, unfortunately, this comes at the detriment of a wider understanding of Algeria’s problems (the French role at the heart of these problems), and a rounded picture of the Algerian individuals represented in the film.
Beauvois and Comar’s film is so deeply ensconced in the ponderous rhythms and profound faith of the Trappist monks’ life that it entirely forgoes characterisation of any Algerian – whether villager, fundamentalist or governmental – and offers no explanations for their troubling actions, or the national conflict which shapes and propels the film’s narrative. Possibly the film’s creators assume a knowledge on the part of the audience of the intricacies of Algeria’s history of colonial rule under the French, and the religious and socio-political troubles the country has battled since being granted independence in 1962. Given their shared history, certainly French audiences are more likely to be familiar with the Algerian Civil War than others, and films are often admirable and successful when focusing on the specifics and the quotidian, letting the audience draw wider political conclusions for themselves.
The problem with Of Gods And Men, however, is that its specific focus does not encourage, or even allow the viewer to expand on its minutiae in order to gain a greater understanding of the internal or external conflict. The unflinching focus on the monks comes at the expense of the Algerians, resulting in a simplistic, Manichean representation of the political situation.
Whereas the monks are consistently bathed in imagery of holiness, purity, goodness and warmth, the aggression of the Algerian Muslim ‘extremists’ is half-heartedly painted as illogical, ignorant and paradoxically anti-religious. Elsewhere, the Algerian army is sinister, dangerous and unhelpful, government ministers corrupt, and the villagers - the only half-way positive representations of Algerians in the whole film - are disinterestedly weak, simple and needy.
The night before the narrative’s climactic event, the monks hold a ‘last supper’ with Tchaikovsky soaring loudly on the soundtrack. For a film which largely forgoes explicit sentimentalisation in favour of silence, slowness and poetic religiosity, this overwrought scene betrays the emotional simplicity in the film’s formulation. These monks are revered – unrealistically, almost mythically – as paragons of virtue, patience and love, symbols of a ‘correct’ form of religion: white, European, civilised and Christian.
Algerians, under oppressive French colonial rule from 1830 to 1962, should be offended by a French production which represents their resulting troubles through the exalting story of a group of morally pure white French Christians, and their evil treatment at the hands of Algerian brutes. Only once during the film is France’s colonial past in Algeria mentioned – an offhand gesture to complexity – and in producing a story which asks us to sympathise with a group of colonial leftovers in lieu of Algerian victims, Of Gods And Men presents an unpleasantly simplistic, Eurocentric representation of history.
The performances are first class, and the film holds a largely consistent and evocative mood of patience, melancholy and glacial tension. By removing Muslim atrocities from their political context, however, the film paints a simplistic and conservative snapshot of history, with an ultimately unfaithful pretention toward universal profundity. KI
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