I didn't set out consciously to write on this blog only about the specifically religious films I see—so the fact that I keep doing so may perhaps be a subconscious vindication of my career choice in my early twenties to go to divinity school. As much as I have strayed from the traditional ministry path since then, it is still the films grappling with religious questions that interest me most. And the latest of these that I've seen—and would now recommend to anyone with a Criterion Channel subscription—is the stunning 2012 Romanian film, Beyond the Hills.
The film's director, Cristian Mungiu, has made something of a specialty in mining the most notorious aspects of modern Romanian history to create starkly realistic, emotionally gut-punching dramas. In his earlier 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days, he portrayed the effects of former dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu's criminalization of abortion in harrowing detail. In 2012's Beyond the Hills, he explores some of the downstream consequences of this same policy—specifically, the coming of age in the country's post-communist era of a generation of unwanted children who were warehoused in Romania's gruesome state-run orphanages during Ceaușescu's rule.
The film tells the story of two women who formed an intense bond as children abandoned to one of these grim institutions, and who have since sought very different ways to cope with its traumatic effects. One of the pair, Voichița, has taken vows as a novice nun intending to join an Eastern Orthodox convent on the hill above their home town. The other, Alina, cannot understand her choice and wishes for the two of them to run off together and work on a cruise ship, so that they can be together as roommates just as they were at the orphanage. "Don't you love me anymore?" she asked Voichița. "Yes," the other replies, "just in a different way."
Perhaps we are meant to infer that the two women had a sexual relationship in the orphanage, or that Alina has unrequited romantic yearnings for Voichița. It's also possible, though, that the pair's relationship is precisely what it seems—and precisely what they understand it to be: they formed an intense co-dependent friendship as children, under the pressure of an extreme situation, when both faced the daily threat of violence and isolation if they did not band together. Such fraught, emotionally high-stakes, but non-sexual attachments are formed by young people more often than conventional society believes, even in such relatively "normal" settings as a four-year residential college, say.
The truth about such obsessive friendships, which defy conventional romantic or sexual categories, and are therefore often cast as "unhealthy" among mainstream society, is not that they do not occur. As Jean Cocteau put it in his Les Enfants terribles, "these houses continue to maintain a precarious equilibrium in defiance of all laws of man and nature." But, this is not the same thing as saying these attachments survive. Cocteau goes on: "persons who base their calculations on the inexorable force of circumstance assume, correctly, that such lives are doomed." (Lehmann trans.)
Alina's relationship with Voichița is one of these doomed attachments, and so, its fall in the film occurs with the inevitability inherent in every great tragedy. When the film opens, Alina has just come to visit Voichița in the convent. She attempts to persuade her to leave so they can travel for work and take up their old lives together. Voichița refuses, explaining that she has found peace in the religious life. Alina is skeptical, suspecting her former roommate of having an affair with the priest who exercises near-total patriarchal control over the convent.
In their different ways, both women are seeking a solution to the pervasive problem of loneliness and abandonment—the fundamental problem of the orphanages. Voichița claims to have found the ultimate way to ensure that she "will never have to be alone again": namely, by putting her trust in God (though Alina thinks this is code for her attachment to God's much more earthly and immediate representative in her midst). Alina says she does not want God—only Voichița. In this regard, she is rather like Lord Byron's Giaour—who enters a monastery in the poem's frame narrative, but tells the ministering priests there, in essence: keep your otherworldly salvation; I don't need it—just bring my lost love back to me.
Indeed, Giaour-like, the only time Alina resorts to religion in the film is when she prays to have Voichița's single-minded affection restored to her. Alina hears from her friend that the priest keeps an unusually holy icon in a hidden chamber behind the altar. She demands to see it so that it can grant her wishes. Alina is not so much an unbeliever, she insists, as she is someone who wonders why God does not answer her sole wish and desire. But she would not need anyone, she maintains—not God nor Jesus nor priest—if she could only have Voichița's love.
One is reminded here, not only of Byron, but also of Jean Genet's Divine, who placed the claims of human love over those of any deity—whether it be a god of punishment or one of consolation. Of her, Genet writes: "as soon as she recognized the presence within her of seeds of these [theological] fears (divine wrath, scorn, disgust), Divine made of her loves a god above God, Jesus, and the Holy Virgin, to whom they were submissive like everyone else[.]" (Frechtman trans.) One could see Alina endorsing every word of this theology. She has made of her love of Voichița a "god above God."
The film does not necessarily take a "side" in this eternal debate between the claims of human and divine love. It is in many ways a critique of religious fanaticism, but it is profoundly fair-minded in its critique, and spares secular society in its satire just as little as it does religious institutions. The nuns and priests are in some sense ignorant extremists who end up destroying Alina through one of their more controversial rites—but one of the ironies of the film is that they do so with good intentions, and with all the appearance of caring for Alina more than the many secular institutions of society ever did—the orphanage, the foster system, the medical system, all of which have callously given up on her and abandoned her.
In short, the film's religious characters—while ultimately misguided, to disastrous effect—are not unsympathetic. They are portrayed as sincere in their beliefs and practices. While there are hints of a mutual attraction between Voichița and the priest, for instance, there is no indication of any actual sexual impropriety or hypocrisy of the kind that Alina imagines. The priest himself is well-meaning, if authoritarian and bigoted in his views, and keeps his cool in the face of opposition. He retains his dignity in the film, that is, even as his actions yield increasingly dire consequences.
The film's critique of religion therefore does not rest on portraying the believers as bad people or full of false pride, but on seeing the faith itself as lacking in answers. In one of the film's most darkly amusing scenes, the other nuns at the convent are puzzling over why Alina still seems unhappy and disruptive, even after going to confession. They conclude that she must have forgotten to list some of her sins, and so they get out a tract that provides a catalogue of every possible sin—numbering above 400 in total—and insist that Alina go through each one in order and confess whether or not she has committed it.
The first few sins in the tract are all concerned with matters of faith and belief, rather than action. One of these early sins concerns the problem of evil: "I have wondered why, if God is all-powerful, he does not do something to stop all the terrible things that happen in the world." After the nuns read her this description, Alina asks: "Well, why doesn't he do anything?" The nuns observe: "Ah, so you have had that thought, then. Make sure you write that down so you can mention it in confession."
Are the nuns wrong? Is Alina right? The film does not ask us to impugn Voichița's faith or the solution she has pursued to solve their mutual problem of loneliness. Nor, as I say, does the film portray secular society as offering better answers. One by one, the orphanage, the foster system, the hospital all fail to help Alina or offer her refuge; and in the end it is only the convent that is willing to care for her, even as they are the ones who destroy her. One would not, in watching the film, feel compelled to side with the callous doctors or cops or government bureaucrats the film portrays over the priest and his followers.
But the viewer—or at least, this viewer—does feel obliged to side with Alina. Voichița tells her that she should not put her trust in worldly things—in merely human affections—because these are fleeting and must perish. Only God's companionship is real, because only it is eternal. Yet, the Alinas of the world can rejoin, with Byron's Giaour—that it is better nonetheless to have something that is fleeting, that is "doomed," in Cocteau's phrase, just so long as it exists for now in the real world, and not in the phantom realm of the spirit.
This is the attitude of true humanism, and it has a heroism of its own. It is the voice Paphnutius hears in the desert, in Anatole France's Thaïs. The anchorite has been reminding himself, in order to learn the life of renunciation, that one day he will die. But then, this voice in the desert offers a rejoinder—and it speaks in so doing with the voice of Alina, with the voice of Byron, with the voice of Genet's Divine. It asks, in essence: why should the fact that one must die mean that, in the meantime, one should not live?
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