Avis des critiques

A thoughtful piece of raw, austere filmmaking, catering specifically for those interested in serious and adventurous cinema.

Bresson’s 1968 parable Mouchette is unmistakably the primary template for Hadewijch, right up to its watery finale – though Dumont’s tale has a rather different ending from that of Bresson. The exact meaning of that transcendently head-spinning coda – and thus of the entire film – is, however, a matter of opinion and debate.

Here and in the considerably less naturalistic Hors Satan, Dumont has made two films that, while they provide ample food for discussion, nevertheless remain tantalisingly slippery; it would take a much longer analysis by a critic who was also a theologian to get to grips fully with Hadewijch. Dumont has reaffirmed his status as one of today’s most individual and genuinely uncompromising auteurs.

With his great capacity for translating environment to the screen, writer-director Bruno Dumont shows a quietly crumbling European Christianity in wintertime, of empty seats in houses of worship held together with scaffolding.

Dumont seems to share something in common with the perverted old master [Luis Buñuel]. Like Sylvia Pinal’s character in Viridiana (1961), Céline seeks a pious life divorced from men, but when pushed by her own good intentions into an encounter with violence, she awakens from her haze.