Of Gods and Men (DVD) directed by Xavier Beauvois

The DVD for this film will be released in the United States this coming July. The film is made in French, with English subtitles. It is based on the true story of a group of French Trappist monks at a monastery in Algeria, whose lives were threatened by Muslim extremists in 1996.

Massacres of civilians took place in Algeria, a former French colony, from 1994 to 1999. Intellectuals, journalists, foreigners and those exhibiting westernized conduct (such as women unveiled) – they were all included as targets in the war between Algeria’s military government and Islamic rebels. The majority of those killed, however, were simply villagers who were perceived as supporters of the hated regime, or as those who refused to join the rebel movement. Some testimony has emerged that the police and the army as well were infiltrated by the rebels, since both exhibited failure to protect citizens or to pursue the murderers and rapists. The possibility of government-instigated attacks has been raised as well, orchestrated to exonerate their own harsh tactics against civilians and to further tarnish the rebels’ reputation. While our press did not single out these events, it was a black time for Algeria and for France as well.

The film is not a violent one, although we witness the deaths of some foreign workers, and feel the danger posed by the rebels to the villagers and to the monks. There are seven monks at the monastery, joined at the film’s end by one more who returns from a journey. The first seven men we get to know slowly, seeing them at their tasks - gardening and harvesting, studying and reading, visiting the Muslim villagers and treating their sick. All these activities surround their religious occupation of prayer and celebrating mass. They sing the mass and the prayers, and this chanting is almost the only music in the film. Their lives are presented as a seamless whole – moving from work and study to the repose of contemplation, swiftly yet without haste donning their habit over their work clothes, ready to worship and to receive their God.

Caught between departing to save their skins and staying to be brutally murdered, the monks differ in how they see their situation and what they believe they ought to do. Acknowledging the risk of staying, their prior states that no outside authority has the right to make their decision for them, even though the government is begging them to leave. What becomes clear is how close they are to the villagers after so many years, and how abandoned the people would feel if the monks left. The monks’ fate is riveting as they wrestle with their decision, each in his own way struggling alone, yet bound with the others in the stillness and immensity of their shared vocation.

Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder : a novel / by Evelyn Waugh

A masterpiece of twentieth century literature perhaps most known as an award winning miniseries (1981) starring Jeremy Irons, Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is a timeless classic set during the pivotal interwar years in Britain, uniquely examining the wealthy upper classes--their family values, social obligations and the peculiar, often tragic situations in which they live.

An officer in the Second World War, Capt. Charles Ryder heads a reserve infantry unit currently being shuffled between training grounds still awaiting their marching orders for deployment to the front lines. A dismal, brooding and melancholic Capt. Ryder has grown apathetic to his job, morbidly depressed by the situation and wholly disillusioned with life in the Army. By chance, when his platoon is restationed near an extravagant estate house, Charles himself is "revisited" by memories of past times spent at the grand home and his interaction with the charming, yet troubled family who lent it its namesake--the Flytes of Brideshead Manor. Initially recalled are Charles' years at Oxford when as a first year student, he became associated with young Sebastian Flyte, an eccentric young man from an extremely wealthy family whose oddities and peculiarities--always dressing in party clothes, carrying a Teddy bear at all times, over-expressive acts of generosity and contrition, etc.--were only rivaled by his extravagant taste, equally extravagant friends and incorrigible reckless behavior.

Through his friendship with Sebastian, Charles becomes acquainted with the other Flytes; of whom Sebastian himself views unfavorably (identifying them as "beasts"), but with whom Charles grows especially close to throughout the successive months, years and accompanying decades. Sebastian's mother Lady Teresa Flyte ("Lady Marchmain") is the matriarchal head of the family and defacto proprietor of the Brideshead estate. The situation stands that, after a falling out with her husband Lord Marchmain, who has since remained abroad in conspicuous attempt to avoid any contact with his wife, Lady Marchmain has basically reared their four Children--Bridey, Julia, Sebastian and young Cordelia--alone, bringing them up in the tradition of her own stringent Catholicism and instilling in them the faith's truths, principles and particularly dire implications on life, death and eternity.

It is the incontrovertible convictions imparted by the faith upon each Flyte family member which Charles sadly discloses as the legacy he most associates with Brideshead. From Charles' viewpoint, the outdated, absurd and innocuous aspects of the faith, its rules and regulations, standards and strictures have directly influenced the tragic demise of the family and, indirectly, the dissolution of his own happiness. This is truly a remarkable novel; brilliant as a reflective, epochal, incisively critical and passively satirical period piece illuminating the era's class system, the obligations of the aristocracy, its paradoxical family values, multiple obstacles to relationships and still-lingering restrictions of religion. Waugh's masterpiece has withstood the test of time to not only maintain its initial success since its 1946 publication, but has grown in popularity over the years, attracting new readers with each passing generation. (DVD BRIDESHE)