Philip Gröning's nearly three-hour documentary on a Carthusian monastery in the French Alps, covering a space of time from winter to winter. (Since the German filmmaker, a one-man crew, spent but five months in the monastery, one must presume a bit of editing-room illusionism at work.) Evocative rather than instructive, lyrical rather than factual, sensorial rather than verbal, it is rich in sights and sounds, closely, carefully observed. Singly, the shots, the scenes, do not last long, do not drag. But they mount up. And up and up and up. A labor of love, with the accent on labor, this one-of-a-kind study is marked not so much by any great technical facility or stylistic flair as by its fundamental tact and restraint, a respect for its subject, not quite a reverence. Character interest is minimal. We do not get to "know" any of the monks, although, in individual portraits interspersed throughout, we get to look straight into the eyes of each of them, who endure the examination with differing degrees of forbearance and comfort. These men are most often observed in solitary activities, reflective of their daily regimen: praying, reading, gardening, preparing or delivering or consuming food, and so on. There is no narrative thread. No one dies. No one quits. No one gets expelled. Nothing "happens." The film in a sense is irreducible: impossible to encapsulate, impossible to summarize. Could it not, though, have been reduced in length? Possibly. Slightly. But who's to say by how much? Gröning was granted -- and he grants us in turn -- a privileged view inside a private world, and it is not a world for the tourist on a tight schedule. It is a world for life. Our guide has not attempted to make that world palatable to the idle bystander, has not attempted unduly to process it and package it. The queue of people who will want access to it is bound to be miles shorter than a queue for the private world of, let's say, the football locker room or the rock-group tour bus. But whomever this film is for, however few they may be, they're lucky to have it. The gravest danger in the length of the thing is simply the temptation, by the end of it, to flatter yourself that you've become one of the boys, that you've grown "close." Even at almost three hours, it is still only a glimpse. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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