Review of Of Gods and Men (2010) by Eve C — 24 Aug 2010

With ?Des hommes et des Dieux?, Xavier Beauvois explores with intelligence, nuance and poignancy the lives of the seven cistercian monks of Tibhirine in the months preceding their abduction by Islamist fundamentalists in 1996 and subsequent assassination (though still today it remains unclear who in fact is responsible for their death). Beauvois has signed a magnificent film that chooses not to linger on the violence, though it of course inhabits the film, but rather to induct us intimately into the regulated lives of these brothers and their harmonious existence with and commitment to the muslim community of the Atlas mountains. As political tensions rise and immigrants, professors and youth are slaughtered, the monks are compelled by all sides to leave. The brothers? inner struggle as they have to decide whether to abandon the monastery and local community plays out in the turbulence of their features, the distress of their prayers, the disquiet of their gestures. The actors? performances are nothing short of miraculous and the sequence where they listen to Swan?s Lake as they share their evening meal is perhaps one of the most eloquent I have ever seen.

Beauvois? plea is a sober but urgent one. One that aims not to place blame on political or religious attitudes, nor to elevate the lives of these monks as martyrs above any other life lost, but to conjure a vision of willful peace, passion for life and real courage. Courage that does not steel the spirit stoically against the perils of life but mourns life?s precarity and accepts fear as the expression of a dignified attachment to the living, and in fear learns to face death.