24/11/2009

A young, fragile-looking girl walks through a forest, stops to pray, then sets off again towards the abbey which has taken her in and is about to send her back into the world for not respecting the rules by imposing too many sacrifices on herself. Named Céline, but nicknamed Hadewijch [+see also:
trailer
film profile] like the 13th-century Flemish poet and mystic, she is the strange heroine of Bruno Dumont’s fifth feature.

This remarkable film, which won the FIPRESCI Prize at the latest Toronto Film Festival and was selected in competition at San Sebastian, is being launched theatrically tomorrow by Tadrart films on 56 screens.

"I don’t have a boyfriend, I love Christ". The daughter of a high-ranking civil servant, Céline (Julie Sokolowski) lives an idle life in her family’s luxury apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis in Paris. By chance, she meets Yassine (Yassine Salime), a youngster from the suburbs, who is a good-natured flirt and occasional scooter thief.

An ambiguous friendship develops between them, which transcends social divides and leads Céline to Yassine’s brother, a Muslim preacher (Karl Sarafidis) who listens to her, consoles her, then uses her ("violence is natural, it’s in the nature of things; moreover, we’re responding to another violence") in an unlikely combination of religious fanaticisms.

Dumont shrouds this spiral in mystery in a magnificent ending, which opens up multiple avenues of interpretation for a work carried by its beautiful visual inventiveness and the discovery of a young actress with a melancholy expression drifting towards the unreachable.

Hadewijch was produced by 3B Productions for €3.4m. The budget included co-production support from Arte France Cinéma and Germany’s Herbstfilms Produktion, an advance on receipts from the National Film and Moving Image Centre (CNC), pre-sales from Canal + and Ciné Cinéma and backing from the Ile-de-France and Nord Pas-de-Calais regions. International sales are being handled by Pyramide.

(Translated from French)