Hadewijch – review

HADEWIJCH Bruno Dumont
Julie Sokolowski as the novice Céline in Bruno Dumont's drama Hadewijch. Photograph: imagenet

Hadewijch was an obscure 13th-century poet and mystic from the Dutch province of Brabant, whose name is taken by the 20-year-old French novice Céline (the non-professional actress Julie Sokolowski) in this characteristically inert film by the French moviemaker Bruno Dumont, a Robert Bresson follower of a religious bent. Céline is kicked out of her convent for excessive zealotry, which involves going without food and drink, and returns to study theology in Paris where her haut-bourgeois family (her father is in the government) lives in some style on the Ile St-Louis.

Having been rejected by the church she falls in with some young Arabs, who introduce her to a charismatic Muslim religious teacher and political activist. He takes her to witness the persecution of his people in an unnamed Middle Eastern country where she is apparently persuaded to participate in a terrorist action.

It's rather like a version of Louis Malle's Lacombe Lucien, a masterly film about a dim country lad in the Dordogne who's rejected by the Resistance during the occupation and turns instead to the pro-Nazi militia where he's treated with respect. Dumont's elliptical movie is as stiff as an over-starched wimple and rather tedious, but like earlier films of his it has something that sticks in the mind like the hook in a fish's mouth.