Xavier Beauvois puts a small group of people under pressure and watches them decide, at their pace rather than ours. The method is austere and occasionally in love with its own stillness, and in Of Gods and Men it earns nearly every quiet minute.
Fi1m perspective
Brother Luc hands out tablets and second-hand shoes to a queue of villagers, and Xavier Beauvois lets us watch the queue. Nothing in the first half hour of Of Gods and Men (2010) hurries. The monks keep bees, sell honey at the market and go to chapel a great deal, and by the time the army arrives at the gate offering soldiers we know exactly what the prior is refusing on everyone's behalf. That is the Beauvois method in one film: show the routine, put the routine at risk, then watch the people inside it work out what to do.
He came up the slow way, on short films and assistant jobs in the mid-1980s after failing the entrance exam for the national film school, and his debut Nord (1991) was an autobiographical picture of a fractured family in the Pas-de-Calais where he was born. Don't Forget You're Going to Die (1995), a disenchanted portrait of a student facing his own death, got him noticed. The Young Lieutenant (2005) took the same patience into a police station and built a procedural out of routine, prepared like a documentary. Then came the monastery, and after it The Price of Fame (2014), The Guardians (2017), about women keeping rural life going through the First World War, and Drift Away (2021), a gendarme in the countryside living with an accidental killing. The subjects change; the shape hardly does. A group, a place, a pressure from outside, and a great deal of looking.
The looking is done mostly with Caroline Champetier, who has shot six of his films and frames people head-on and without decoration, so that we are standing among them rather than admiring the picture. Marie-Julie Maille has edited five of them. In Of Gods and Men the monastery designed by Michel Barthélémy is whitewash, worn wood and one bare bulb to a room, and the plainchant runs its full length every time. We sat through the first two hymns close to tears at how plain the men's voices were, and through the fourth wondering how much of the office was left. That is the risk he runs. Austerity is a choice and he makes it every time, and a viewer who wants the drama brought to the sofa will find him distant.
What he does better than most is a group under threat trying to agree, with the camera declining to take sides. He co-wrote Of Gods and Men with Étienne Comar, and he has said that the film is about men more than gods, which is the right way in to all of his work. Michael Lonsdale's Luc, dispensing tablets and shoes to whoever turns up, is the performance to start with. Start there, on an evening with nothing planned after it.
Biography
Xavier Beauvois is a French actor, film director and screenwriter. Born on 20 March 1967 in Auchel, Pas-de-Calais, he began directing with the short film Le Matou (1986) and his first feature North (1991).
His film Don't Forget You're Going to Die (1995) won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Of Gods and Men (2010), which he directed and co-wrote, received the Grand Prix and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes and was selected as France's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Beauvois has also acted in films including House of Pleasures (2011), Farewell, My Queen (2012) and Let the Sunshine In (2017), and appeared as himself in the series Call My Agent! (2015).
