Of Gods and Men again

The only film to watch after the horrific murder of an 86 year old priest, which makes my heart hurt as much as the execution of Palmyra's elderly curator, is one of the few masterpieces of recent years, Des hommes et des dieux. No need to write more about it here than I have already on the blog - invoking that entry for a third time - except to say that it sums up the best thoughts of religion rather than the (many) worst. This very short clip encapsulates connection between people on this earth instead of division. Context: the Catholic priests serving a Muslim community in Algeria, and threatened by terorism, are discussing whether they should leave or not.

Priez pour paix

Having noticed this piece from January 2011 rising up the most-viewed list, I make no apologies for republishing it now. Not only does it embed the exquisitely simple Poulenc song which is one possible response to the weekend's events - though I hasten to add I don't think of 'prayer' in narrow Christian terms - but it also reminds me to go back and watch one of the greatest films possibly ever. Unless you seek total escapism, it's the right thing to see at the moment, though you'll weep. My review DVD is still in the hands of our Meknes host at the Riadh Laboul, so I'd better get another copy.

I make no apologies for juxtaposing the peaceful song-title - bearing in mind Poulenc's inward setting of Charles d'Orleans's invocation under threat of war - and the violence implicit in Caravaggio's painting. Both the juxtaposition and the image play key parts in Xavier Beauvois's near-flawless film Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux): Luc (the infallibly sympathetic Michael Lonsdale) leans against the wounded body in a poster of the picture on the wall of his Algerian monastery and we begin to understand what 'love of Christ' might actually mean.

In fact all the best aspects of faith are to be found in the exquisitely chosen dialogues and quotations of the film's awe-inspiring script, with the Koran playing almost as large a role as the Bible. I'm hoping to obtain a copy of the text as it's a collection of wisdom in itself. In the meantime, read Dom Christan de Cherge's testament, written in Algiers on 1 December 1993, produced at his monastery of Our Lady of Atlas in Tibhirine on New Year's Day 1994 and opened on Pentecost Sunday 1996 shortly after the murders of Christian and his fellow Trappists (is it possible to talk about this film without foreknowledge of its end? I don't think so, though clearly an audience which didn't know the outcome would find it even more suspenseful). This is the voice not of a missionary - the director had said he would have found it hard to make a film about that - but of someone who dearly loved Algeria and his Muslim brothers.


Of Gods and Men works simply on so many levels: as a meditation on sound and silence - the popcorn crunching next to me soon stopped, and the Curzon Mayfair was still for the rest of the screening - in which music plays a minimal but essential role, Tchaikovsky as much as religious chant, and we understand what's not verbalised (as when, for instance, Lambert Wilson's Christian touches the trunk of a huge, ancient tree); as an unsentimental embodiment of what it might really mean to live and work in a community which may worship differently; and above all, ultimately, as a palpitation-inducing speculation on whether fear or faith will have the last word (the final procession which melts into the snow leaves the question open).

Unusually, I don't want to say much more, or to sully the film with any clips: just go see for yourselves. If only it could be screened in Iraq and Egypt in their current times of trouble, too*: not, of course, as anything as crass as a Christian tract, but just for its simple reflections on the 'all men are/should be brothers' line. It's enough, as Golaud says in Pelleas et Melisande, to make stones weep. But not in a bad way.

Anyway here's Poulenc's 'Priez pour paix', the first of four songs delivered here by Charles Panzéra with his wife at the piano (I wanted the Ann Murray recording, but it's not on YouTube; now - 17/11/2015 - Felicity Lott is there with Pascal Rogé, but for some reason not embeddable). The simple poem is by Charles d'Orleans (1394-1465)



And how could I not reproduce the most moving final scene in all opera, the nuns to the guillotine in Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites? This is perhaps director Robert Carsen's finest achievement, seen in the Scala production conducted (magnificently) by Riccardo Muti and with Dagmar Schellenberger giving a stunning performance as Blanche. When I encountered Carsen at a BBC Music Mag awards gathering, I asked him what working on it had signified. He replied with tears in his eyes that his mother had just died and it meant the world to her. A pity we don't get the brutal Prokofiev-style march before the Salve Regina here, the equivalent to the simultaneous noise of hovering helicopter and chant in one of the film's most powerful sequences.



The Carmelites, of course, have high-profile martyrdom thrust upon them; one of the points in Of Gods and Men is that the brotherhood wants to live as long as it can simply to do good to its flock as - in the words of one village lady - the branch on which they sit, and does not seek death. But the way in which the men individually come to terms with what it means to stay or to leave is another remarkable aspect of this cinematic masterpiece.

*17/11/2015 Hard, isn't it, to think of a time when Syria wasn't ripping itself apart (that started in March 2011, two months after I wrote this post)? Or that any of us wandered free and happy through the souks of Damascus and Aleppo, or the ruins of Palmyra and Qalaat Samaan, meeting kindness at every turn.

Good Friday at Tioumliline

By serendipity, I'd just watched a second time what I can only describe as a great masterpiece of cinema, Des hommes et des dieux (Of Gods and Men), and written an all too brief precis review of its DVD release for The Arts Desk when I discovered that where we were going in Morocco was only an hour and a half's journey away from its location. Director Xavier Beauvois couldn't film in Tibhirine, the Algerian monastery from which the Trappist inhabitants were abducted to be murdered in 1996, so he chose a potent equivalent in the middle Atlas mountains of the neighbouring country.  

Potent because Tioumliline, named after the source of the river which flows down to the town of Azrou from this altitude of 1500 metres, also seems to have been a goodly experiment which ended in a dissolution, albeit a less violent one. Like Tibhirine, Tioumliline had its dispensary giving free medical treatment to villagers in need, and helped provide food when harvests failed; and again, there seems to have been no missionary intent, just a faithful imitation of the bounty of Christ. According to my Rough Guide, the local who now lives in the dispensary, Monsieur Boudaoud, remembers the monks with great affection; but despite the harmony that existed between Muslims and Christians, and the value of the monastery's library to students at Azrou's famous Berber College, the governing Istiqlal party closed it down in 1968 - not the mid-1990s, please note, Rough Guide - on the grounds that the monks were proselytising. 

What stands now is a ruin in remarkably good shape, perhaps because the film crew may have restored certain elements when they came here a couple of years ago. It was totally deserted in the rain when we arrived - no sign of M. Boudaoud, only a couple of child shepherds shouting to their flock nearby - so having walked up the steps from the minor road through the holm oaks some five kilometres above Azrou (we walked the long way because the footpaths aren't signed)

we found our way in to the chapel. It's very much as you see it in the film, minus the benches, the lamps and the chanting bodies. Below the modern stained glass which plays such a prominent part in the film 

is the aumbry, which combines elements of Moroccan carving both when closed 

and open. 

I think I'll spare you a corny little tribute to the spirit of place, complete with 'Kyries', but the sequel film will give you some sense of how heavy the rain had become by the time we decided to leave the sanctuary.

   

No wonder there were signs of sheep having sought shelter within. The view, already disappearing when we arrived, of a farm and a distant Azrou 

was now non-existent. Our walk back was a real penance, as driving wind lashed hail against my poor supra-orbital fracture and dizzied me with the pain. One reward was the friendly shrug of 'what can you do?' from the equally drenched Berber making his way back up the hill. Moroccans really do have the most candid, open smiles if you can engage them or share in a bit of suffering. Because J's only trousers were wringing wet, we couldn't go down for supper at Azrou's Hotel des Cedres - the voluble waiter kindly brought it to the room - and then I did go down, with a chill, and threw up a couple of times once we got back to Meknes. So I'm not sure our planned trek would have happened anyway. But since the rain was still torrential the next morning, we gave up on that, sat for an hour in the best patisserie of our trip hoping in vain for the skies to clear and then, having taken a quick soggy spin around Azrou to see the rock after which it's named,

caught a creaking, fumous bus back to Meknes. There, once I'd been sick in the souk on the way back to the riad, Mouna was on hand to provide mint tea and sympathy. And the next morning I was right as...rain, which finally gave way to the brilliant sunshine we'd enjoyed at the start. Wouldn't have missed that little pilgrimage for the world, though. And we watched Of Gods and Men again with Sophie and Keita chez Lahboul, being struck more than ever by the craft which a first viewing so carefully conceals. The Swan Lake Last Supper scene with the headshots is one of the great moments in cinema - I still wept even though I knew it was coming - and I think this time we admired the ensemble work even more; Lambert Wilson and Michael Lonsdale seemed to dominate less. Here's a superbly detailed royal review by my old colleague Jonathan Romney. 

I'd still like to see the screenplay published; in the meantime, I select two great quotations. One, especially pertinent for this momentous week, is when Brother Luc quotes Pascal's 'men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction' (you have to admit, though, there never seemed anything cheerful about Osama Bin Laden. Maybe five-year old Cecco had a point worth remembering in charity now when he asked his mum Mary 'didn't Bin Laden have his feet tickled when he was a little boy?'). The other is the conference with the community and the Islamic elder when Brother Celestin says 'we are like birds on a branch: uncertain when we'll fly away', and a village woman quietly says 'We're the birds. You're the branch'.