In the depths of the Algerian mountains A comprehensive panorama of the life of a group of Cistercian monks in the mountains of North Africa becomes a field for solving acute existential problems.
Gardens and apiaries, clean spacious cells and complacent locals. This earthly paradise opens the film Xavier Beauvois. The director immediately includes the viewer in the daily circle of monks, without neglecting scenes with religious singing or routine work.
Sudden external threats - the appearance of innocuous terrorists, which even the imams here did not know before, and the invasion of the army - lead the monks into confusion. Go to a safe France or stay in Algeria to the end, fulfilling his duty to a foreign country?
Freedom. Freedom of individual choice and group decision, attitude to Islam and Islamism, faith and doubt. All these questions Beauvois considers in the light of humanism in the best sense of the word. Called to be gods, monks regularly show their own weakness, but they do not abandon their duty. They are afraid of the future, suffer from loneliness and a lot of doubts, but as methodically as always gather for daily services. "We're like birds on a branch," says Brother Celestine. “No, we are birds and you are a branch,” the locals object.
There are two scenes in the film that you cannot pass by.
Equality. The roar of a combat helicopter that flew over dilapidated houses in a neighboring village and dreadfully hovered near the walls of the monastery. The danger of peace that prompts us to invoke God in a truly unifying prayer.
Brotherhood. And the second union, on a purely human level. The apotheosis of which becomes an ordinary meal to secular music. But I think Tchaikovsky has never become a symbol of unity in an environment that clearly evokes an allegory with a very famous fresco.
Called to become gods, the heroes of the film Beauvois at least managed to remain human.
9 out of 10
Original