Simply put, Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life is a cinematic depiction of costly discipleship. To those who would have eyes to see it, it offers a sense of the Holy- no less than the holiness referenced in a Rublev icon; of the joy & pain in a Love outstretched.
It’s a biographical film of Austrian conscientious objector, Franz Jägerstätter, who in refusing to swear a loyalty oath to Hitler during WWII, was consequently martyred, and later beatified in the Catholic Church. And it’s a masterpiece unparalleled in a generation; a masterpiece that can be recognized & known by the way that only beauty (or Love, itself) renders one completely defenseless.
The film’s dialogue & narrations are almost entirely composed of inward, uplifted prayer – as Malick has done previously through his cosmic exploration of Nature, Grace, & theodicy in Tree of Life (2011)- and composed of the love letters exchanged between Franz and his wife Franny during his imprisonment. Yet, to a cinephile’s eyes and ears, it seems that the film was itself also a love letter from Malick to the God of faith-filled film greats Robert Bresson & Andrei Tarkovsky.
Hidden references much of Bresson’s cinematic work in sight and sound. Manifestly, it seems an homage to Bresson’s A Man Escaped (Un condamné à mort s’est échappé, 1956) which recounts the imprisonment of a French Resistence leader against the Nazi regime. There’s the structural similarity of the respective prisons and guarded courtyards, the ominous off-scene whistles of trains used by the Third Reich, parallel scenes of detainees lining up -as if to receive the sacrament of communion- to empty out their latrine buckets, and the echoing use of Mozart in the respective soundtracks (which, perhaps only for the likes of Malick and Bresson, is appropriate and unpretentious.) But there are other references to Bresson throughout: the clear-eyed suppleness in Hidden‘s actor August Diehl as Jägerstätter that bears an unmistakable resemblance to Bresson’s model Claude Ladu as the innocent soul of a priest in Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1951)- Ladu, himself a devoutly faithful Catholic, who said that he hadn’t realized until seeing for himself in post-production that he had portrayed a saint under Bresson’s direction- a hand unseen. Even Bresson’s Au Hasard Baltazar is summoned, wherein a beast of burden portrays the presence and likeness of Christ even in the deepest darkness of human suffering, as in Hidden we see the loyalty of a donkey on the farm which Jägerstätter had to leave behind, due to his conviction.
We also see references to the reverent works of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky- first, with hints of Andrei Rublev (1969) here through a cathedral fresco painter in Hidden who confesses to Jägerstätter that, as of yet, he has neither the courage nor the faith to paint the real Christ – the convicting Christ – and so only paints a cheaply “comfortable Christ“ who asks nothing of us – certainly not to follow Him unto death. We can perhaps see the tutelage of Tarkovsky’s masterful cinematography in the work of Hidden‘s cinematographerJourg Widmer. A reviewer (in the trailer above) rightly noted that through Widmer’s lens we “enter a cathedral of the senses.” Like “the Zone” in Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), there is something almost numinous to the grandeur of this Austrian village “above the clouds.” Also, in Hidden, there is the soundtrack notable for its use of J.S. Bach (Matthäus–Passion) a hallmark of Tarkovsky‘s (see, Nostalghia, Solaris et al.), which, with its accompanying reverence, is unpretentious in Hidden, as well.
Hidden is, at its core, a depiction of misunderstood and costly discipleship at its most poignantly, breathtakingly beautiful.
So, you may be wondering why an e-zine that dedicates itself to emotional wholeness & the Church would take the time to review a WWII biopic, and perhaps suspect a classic case of “mission creep.” But here’s where the reviewer finds profound relevance: Mental health and emotional wellness are often at least partially defined (in the DSM) by that which is considered “normative” and contextual to its culture. So, what, then, when society itself becomes sick? How do we define health and wholeness (in Christ) that is uncommon enough to be thought of as pathological or suspect? (We took this up in an article last year entitled Confessions of a Radical). Hidden is a film relevant to our own times. We feel the real need for the body of Christ, outstretched, to be defined not by its political left-ness or right-ness, (which is, if you will, an X-axis issue – neither here nor there). The Church is called to a radical discipleship, which is not farther left or right, but deep (a dimension on the Y-axis that can be found anywhere on the X-axis of the political spectrum). Here’s the cost I hope we willingly take on, as Flannery O’Connor notes: “You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you odd.”