OF GODS AND MEN (Des Hommes et des Dieux, 2010)

In 1991 an "Arab spring" came to Algeria in the form of a free election apparently won by an Islamist party. It was snuffed out when the government voided the election, provoking a violent uprising and a reign of mutual terror, with the common people caught in the middle. Also caught in the middle were the French Trappist monks of the Tibhirine monastery in a village in the Taurus mountains, a vestige of France's colonial presence in the country. As portrayed in Xavier Beauvois' film, the monks are a welcome presence in their village. Brother Luc (Michael Lonsdale) runs a clinic for the poor, while the other monks earn their living by making jelly and other foodstuffs to sell on market day. At no time does the movie show them proselytizing to the Muslim natives. The villagers invite them to weddings and are entirely comfortable with the Christians' presence among them. Some even say that the monastery is the heart of the village. When the threat of terrorism closes in and some of the monks contemplate quitting the village, they describe themselves as birds on a branch, undecided about whether to leave or not. A village elder corrects them: they, the monks, are the branch, and the villagers the birds. The common people think the monastery offers them more protection than a government most despise. The monks themselves would rather not have the protection of a "corrupt" regime. Who'll protect them, then, when the terrorists come?...

Knowing little about Algeria except what I'd read about the civil war as it was happening, I don't know whether Beauvois painted too idealistic a picture of Christian-Islamic harmony in the mountain village, but it certainly is an appealing picture. I can imagine critics questioning the extent to which the village is portrayed depending upon the monks -- it could be called colonialist paternalism, I suppose -- but the monks themselves seem to live up to whatever vows of humility and service they took. They don't lord it over the villagers and clearly aren't out to convert anybody, based on what we see. Nor are the villagers uptight about their own religion; they're disgusted by the crimes of the Islamist terrorists, questioning whether the killers have read the same Qur'an they have. Some of them have, as we learn in a scene when Christian (Lambert Wilson), the monks' leader, persuades a guerilla leader to spare him with a quote from the Qur'an in French translation, which the militant finishes in the original. For the film's purposes, Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance, as Christianity is also at its best, until political fanatics distort its message.

Of Gods and Men makes a point of not just avoiding but repudiating the obvious parallel that might occur to viewers watching the monks stand their ground without government protection despite the increasing hopelessness of their situation. Unlike the terrorists, the monks don't intend to be martyrs. When they finally decide to stay, they don't do so to seek death. Christian makes clear that they should do everything possible to avoid death -- and one of the monks will survive the picture because he finds a place to hide at the right moment. But they also admit that their calling comes with a risk of death, and that, too, they should not avoid. Each feels called to serve God by serving the poor in a distant land, and they owe it to God and the poor to stay on despite the risk. The best argument against staying, at least without protection, may have been made by a government official who warns the monks that their deaths would only be exploited, presumably for propaganda purposes, by other parties. Some critics might say that Beauvois himself and his collaborators have exploited the story, but they may have intended it as a corrective to other, arguably more exploitative accounts -- those that portray the monks as religious martyrs, for instance.

There's no plot to the picture apart from the monks' dilemma and its resolution. It accumulates detail rather than build up narrative momentum, establishing the monks' place in the village and the routines of their private devotional lives. The early part of the picture has an almost documentary quality before the monks develop distinct personalities and individual issues like Luc's declining health and some slight resentment by the others of Christian's dominance. The story develops into a kind of spiritual Alamo, as each monk has to decide whether to stay or flee. The actors, led by Lonsdale and Wilson, are convincing as aging, intelligent men who've known each other for many years. As fate closes in on them, the film seems to grow in scale with sweeping helicopter shots of the village and hosts of soldiers swarming and scrambling nearby. It becomes a kind of epic without conventional action -- we get one shot of throat-slitting to establish the nature of the threat -- with the monks as nonviolent heroes facing inevitable doom as a matter of duty. The epic feeling is only enhanced by the final scenes in a snowy landscape that I, in my geographic ignorance, didn't expect to see in Algeria. But the epic retains an intimate scale in which the fates of nine men mean something, however relevant the episode may have been to the larger conflict.

Beauvois doesn't try to overdramatize this, with one awkward exception: a "last supper" scene in which the monks share wine and listen to a cassette of Swan Lake. This play for pathos seems superfluous and its focus on misty-eyed close-ups deprives the monks of their main strength as characters -- their intelligence. Worse, at least for some American viewers, the excerpt from the ballet we hear is the one long associated with the Universal Horror film cycle and now with the madness of Black Swan, so the effect for me was probably something different from what Beauvois intended. But this is an exceptional false note in an otherwise judicious portrait of men who became martyrs of a kind whether they wanted to or not.