O Pecado de Hadewijch

Told that she is too hardcore, adolescent nun Celine Hadewijch is expelled from her Antwerp convent and released back in to the world, where her desires can be provoked and thus her love for God truly tested.

On Paris' mean streets she meets Yassine, a French Muslim, whose performance I will describe as nonsensical, nervous and numb. The pair meet now and then to partake in teenage thrills, like illegal moped riding. She tells him that she is happy to be friends but nothing more, as her vow to God forces her to remain celibate.

Her love test arrives when she is introduced to Yassine's older brother, a mole-faced terrorist who masquerades as an innocent preacher. He gives poisonous religious seminars in the back of a kebab shop (that'll put you off fish and chips) to perfect terrorist bait: ignorant poor people.

Celine is neither poor or ignorant, but is nonetheless seduced. A dark cloud descends right at the point where she accepts – what? Conversion to Islam? A terrorist assignment? It is left open for interpretation, just like any religious text.

The line 'Abstinence is the idea, not martyrdom' uttered by the Sister Superior in response to Celine's behaviour got me thinking. Has she been forced into religion through neglect from her family? Is her devotion a mask for her insecurity? Or does she suffer because it is man she desires, not God, and cannot forgive herself for not being able to suppress her (God-given) nature?

The interesting part of the film focuses on Celine's personal quest for earthly unity with God, which she knows is unattainable, but pursues for the occasional closeness she feels to Him. Frustratingly this story is shelved in favour of exposing the subtle nature of extremism. My dissatisfaction lay in the misalignment of the two narratives.

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'Hadewijch' is loosely based on the poems of a 13th century female Christian mystic who lived in Belgium. Little is known of her life other than it's been deduced that she came from wealthy stock and didn't belong to a convent. Director Dumont utilizes this background to fashion a contemporary allegory of the seeker's journey to God. He begins his story with a young novice nun, Celine, being expelled from her convent for obsessive self-mortification. The young woman appears to be more disturbed and confused than a true seeker after enlightenment, and her eccentric behavior is partially explained by alienation from disinterested worldly parents after she returns to her family's palatial Parisian townhouse.

Celine begins hanging out with some working class North African Muslim men, empathizing with their religious devotion - and when she expresses her spiritual fervor in extreme terms, they start to consider her as a potential suicide bomber. A number of medieval Christians learned contemplative disciplines from Sufi mystics, and this plot device may be a metaphor for ego annihilation, while simultaneously suggesting all religions are just winding roads leading to the same God. Unfortunately 'Hadewijch' is burdened with too many ponderously slow shots and silent passages that spoil the narrative flow. Celine's story of spiritual longing and repentance might have been told more eloquently if the film had borrowed some of the conventional style of 'Vision' - a biographical account of another medieval female mystic, Hildegard von Bingen - just as that film in its turn could have used some of 'Hadewijch's' intensity and imagination.

Celine is a young novitiate nun who is sent out of the nunnery by her Mother Superior because she is too full of self-love, is too extremist, mistakes abstinence for martyrdom, she needs to test her faith in the real world. Everything she goes through is an attempt to get closer to God. Her novitiate name is Hadewijch, after the 13th century mystic. She's seen at home in the Ile Saint Loue, in a lavish dwelling in modern day Paris with her dog, lounging about or strolling through the corridors and rooms of her affluent parent's, her father a minister, her mother detached, Celine seems alienated. She meets Yassine, a young street thief from the projects, who takes her to a punk concert and realizes she's not interested in sex with him. She pledges herself to Christ and has the mystic's desire to draw closer to His body. Yassine thinks(rightly?)she's nuts, being the only normal person(and very funny)in the story. When she puts her head on his shoulder, he asks does she want love? Dumont does not explore her character: how she became so religious, the roots of her antagonism with her father.Celine is infatuated with God.

She attends a church where Bach is being played by a quartet and is uplifted by it. Sokolowski's face filled with an inner radiance.Yassine breaks the law, steals a motor-bike and goes through red lights with Celine on the back. He introduces her to his older brother Nassir, who is a devout Muslim, and gives talks in the back of a kebab shop about Islamic belief. He can't understand why she suffers for the 'love' of God, she 'must act if you have faith...continue the creator's work'. He says 'innocence' doesn't exist in a democracy, where people vote but take no responsibility. God is a 'sword for truth and justice'. He takes her to an Arabic country to see the humiliation inflicted. She meets a group of terrorists. She declares herself 'with' Nassir, saying she's 'ready' to fight the cause as a way of getting closer to God. We are given to understand she plants a bomb in Paris. There is a street explosion, she travels below on a tube train with Nassir. We take it she was the 'chosen' one. Police go to the convent to ask her questions, but she escapes, pursued by the demons of self-doubt, in the absence of God.

Celine torments herself in her search for God. Julie Sokolowski embodies the ingenue otherworldliness and childlike candour of Celine, with a wan-faced pallor, a bodily awkwardness, suggesting her vulnerability. Her fear that she has paid too high a price, feeling no closer to God, for her actions. Dumont's camera is usually at head height and fairly close up, moving through landscapes in long shots. David, a shirtless Mason and convict on parole who has been working in the convent grounds, comes to play a major part in Celine's salvation as a form of embodied grace. In a world without God there is still the need for the sacred and the spiritual. Dumont shows various forms of fanaticism merging. God is in the humanity of our ordinary, modern world. Dumont takes us on a journey with Celine, the film as mystical act, a poem not to be interpreted at face value, with surrealistic ellipses and lacunae, reason breaking down, we take things on faith. Dumont makes us empathise with Celine. The ending is a problem, instead of signing off with an act of terrorism, Dumont brings in a miraculous climax, the coda a mystery of love, to send you out the door with too many questions in your head. Disturbing, haunting, cathartic.

Religious experience is not always neat. Unless you are a fundamentalist, you often travel many and diverse roads to find God. Celine (Julie Sokolowski), also known as Hadewijch, is in a convent at the beginning, but is kicked out for not following the rules. She is too intense for the other nuns.

For reference, there really was a poet and mystic in the 13th Century with the name Hadewijch, and there is some similarity to Celine.

After returning to Paris, she befriends Yassine (Yassine Salime), a Muslim terrorist. A Christian fanatic and Muslim fanatics; quite a combination. But, Yassine's brother Nassir (Karl Sarafidis) studies the Quaran, and I found it interesting that he is able to comfort Celine when she has troubles. Nassir seeks God, just as Celine does, but in a different way. He looks at God as a sword to fight injustice.

A former philosophy teacher, Director Bruno Dumont does not lead us to a neat resolution of Celine's problems. His ending is cloaked in ambiguity. Does she move closer to God, or has she given up on salvation. He's not telling, and it is left up to you to decide. Good luck with that.

Dumont explores the fine line between martyrdom, fanaticism, faith, and delusion in this meditative (some will call slow paced) look at a young Christian fanatic who befriends a group of 'terrorist' Muslims. Throughout there's a degree of sexual threat and violence so present in his films, as well as the very physical presence of nature, of weather, of the elements. It's an edgy mix, yet most of the time we're looking at the world through the vulnerable searching eyes and face of Julie Sokolowski as Céline/Hadewijch, the latter being a 13th century mystic who also sublimated courtship for a love to God, and who also took no vows as a nun. As Celine, the girl is sent from the convent for being too extreme in her devotion. She begins to naively explore the real world. Like the earlier poet and mystic Hadewijch – into whom she slowly seems to be transforming – Celine is also from a very wealthy family, a fact that sets up another set of questions and contrasts in this contemporary context. I love looking at the faces director Dumont offers up, and as always he sets up situations that call out for argument and conversation. The ending is sudden and unexpected, and you are left to question not only what might happen next, but to where exactly has the director led us.

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