'Of Gods and Men': a tale of monks and martyrs, with a divine cast

Monastic life is anything but tedious in Xavier Beauvois' masterful drama "Of Gods and Men," based on the real-life tragedy of seven French monks abducted and beheaded during Algeria's civil war in 1996.

The film is largely built of ordinary tasks and everyday moments: monks tending their crops, treating Muslim villagers at the monastery clinic, sharing simple meals.

Underlying all this is a tangible, terrible tension. These good Christians know there are forces — both in the besieged government and among terrorists who want to bring it down — that no longer want them there.

Martyrdom is not something for which any of these men signed up. Their crises of faith range from virtually none at all (one or two unflinchingly say at the outset that it's their duty to God and humanity to remain at their posts) to quivering terror (some monks confess they want to flee to safety).

What follows is a truly glorious story of brotherhood. These are men battling to validate the place they have made for themselves in this life, and watching that struggle, foreign though it is to those of us in the secular world, is fascinating.

Written by Beauvois and Etienne Comar, the mostly French-language film is filled with melodic, joyous invocations as the monks sing praise to God and pursue somber, lyrical discourses as they debate their plight and ask heaven for guidance.

Lambert Wilson as head monk Christian and Michael Lonsdale as monk-physician Luc lead a cast that is, without overstatement, divine. The filmmakers chose a range of faces with wonderful expressiveness, the actors revealing tortured souls and soaring spirits, sometimes in the same instant, without saying a word.

Beauvois is deliberately hazy about the circumstances of the monks' deaths. The story is less about specific enemies and more about the denial of enmity — the certitude that devotion is devotion, which should not waver when circumstances are troubling or threatening.

The film won the second-place prize at last May's Cannes Film Festival.