She hears him pray, “The sweetest thing about love is its violence.”

It is suggested to her by Nassir that it is only by channeling one’s faith through powerful acts that the true believer can enter into the most intimate relations with God.

Much of the remainder of the film follows Celine’s growing involvement with fundamentalist Muslim activities pursued by Yassine and his proselytizing older brother, Nassir. Yassine’s recklessness and eruptive anger at times endanger Celine, but she remains friends with him. Soon, she is regularly spending time with one of them, Yassine Chikh, a sullen youth with a volatile temperament, who lives with his older brother, Nassir, on the outskirts of the city. At a coffee shop, she meets three young men, who persuade her to accompany them to an open-air concert that evening. We sense little emotional connection between her parents.ĭivorced from the discipline and rituals of convent life, Celine’s life drifts. Her father is a self-described government “technocrat,” whose hurried, pressurized lifestyle and wide variety of duties contrast sharply with Celine’s life of meditative absorption and single-minded devotion to Christ. She has lied to them that she’s at a break in her theological studies, awaiting word of some exam grades. Celine is told that she may return to the convent, once her spiritual outlook has suitably evolved.Ĭeline returns to live with her parents, with some emotional discomfort, in their opulent Parisian residence. She is forever searching for a path that will lead her to a more palpable manifestation of the Christian deity.Īs a result, she is sent away from the monastery, so that her apparent inclination toward martyrdom might be tempered by outer world experiences.

Regardless, she persists in fasting and going on walks in the December weather without dressing warmly.Ĭeline lives each day in torment, acutely feeling God’s presence in her heart, but finding no visible evidence of Him in the physical world around her. Julie Sokolowski portrays Celine vel Hadewijch, a nun rooted in a life of such denial of physical self that she has received reprimands from the Mother Superior. “Hadewijch” is a closely observed French drama about a young woman’s crises of faith and conscience.

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