The culprits of faith

In Pier Paolo Pasolinis Gospel of Matthew the Christ figure is "undressed". Pasolini tones down the visual aspect of the Christ legend, which loses weight as the authority-based visual culture is diminished. The film leaves us with the man and the actions alone: ​​Pasolini, himself an atheist, removed all props and life-removing rituals from human drama. Although we do not believe in Christ as divine, the religious drama can still catch us, Pasolini said.

That's the way it is Cross road - but here without any Messiah. The film tells how the young Mary is torn between the teenager's natural desires and confusion and the family's ultra-strict religiosity. Along the way, a stronger dream image is developed, including that of religious origin: Mary's notion of herself as a saint who sacrifices her life to God in order for the mute brother to regain speech. This martyr fantasy is only barely visible at the beginning of the film, but gradually takes over the entire world of Mary's imagination. The film's elaborate, stylistic sobriety reflects the protagonist's "sacrificial fetishism": every cheerful and happy inclination must be rejected for Christ and the purity of faith. This is reflected in the director's stagnant, simple tableaux – and it is precisely this cut-down expression that gives the film its beauty.

Admittedly, this beauty is pale and anemic, hardened and hard – just like Mary's faith. Here are points of contact with Lars von Trier Breaking the waves: The main characters of the films are both in unbearable situations – and find a perverted salvation in a form of belief that is basically extremely oppressive.

Bess McNeill, excellently played by Emily Watson, hears church bells from the vault at the end of Trier's movie. IN Cross road release the camera from the ground first in the film's finale, where it rises towards the clouds while disappearing into them, like a soul leaving the earth. Both scenes mark a transcendence, a transcendence of the earthly – but the end images are never released from the tragedy the two women are driven into. Perhaps there is a reconciling streak of hope in the transcendence scenes anyway – in that Bess and Maria, after all, finally get peace .

These are women who find a "way out" inflicted on them by an authority figure. The authorities insist so strongly on the components of the faith that women are deprived of the ability to imagine another world – a world originating in themselves. They are, one might say, trapped in a religious dogma. After Mary's death, we see how the rigidity of faith, which led to doom, is not softened by tragedy. The funeral director notes that "there are many paths to Rome" (implied: many versions of the Christian faith), while the mother still insists that there is only one true faith: "There is no reason to be sad; our daughter died that weekend, "she says.

The interesting thing about Maria's radicalized self-image is how it arises between the youth's groping but strong desires and the form of faith she is integrated into. In the impossible situation, Maria reinvents herself as an idealized fantasy, a hybridized version of the contradictions that the reality of everyday life has caught her in. If life offers dilemmas that cannot be solved in a common reality, one must invent one's own, like Slavoj Zizek points out in Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Only by dying can Mary become herself.

Brüggemann's expression is minimalist and powerless. The human body's movements in the picture frame, dialogue and scenography become crucial. Cross road actually has only 14 camera settings, and almost no camera movements. There is also little cutting.

With his use of the limited picture frame, Brüggemann is related to the Swedish director Roy Andersson. This camera use provides compositional possibilities. Each sequence is built up to a climax before, in theatrical fashion, you go to the next stage.

Such visual nudity will not appeal to everyone, since the simplified and clean-cut direction forces the viewer to linger at each scene. The components of the drama thus sink in with greater emotional intensity than a more conventional direction allows. This undeniably gives the film an analytical quality, since we have to study what we are presented with thoroughly. But also a coolness, neutrality and emotional distance that insists not to seduce the spectator, but that we ourselves should judge what we see.

Cross road is itself built up as a ritual of faith. The title refers to "the way of the cross" – a very specific use of the story of Christ's suffering history up to the crucifixion. Early in the history of Christianity, there was a need to recreate this central story in the religion: Since only a few could travel to Jerusalem, it was recreated in church rooms in the form of sculptures or pictures, so that believers could meditate on the events independently. of where they were in the geography. The journey of suffering itself - painful way - is in this practice divided into representative scenes from Christ's journey towards the crucifixion: "Jesus receives the cross", "Jesus falls for the first time under the cross" and, the most crucial, "Jesus is nailed to the cross". All these scenes are repeated in Cross road, now with Maria in the lead role.

One of the most interesting things about this film is the way the form structures how we relate to the content. Brüggemann strictly adheres to the traditional stages of the "way of the cross" and builds his entire film around these. The use of the ritualized image series makes something with the spectator: The well-known review of Jesus' path to its end reflects a long tradition, where we as witnesses are instructed to meditate both on the images we see and on the last day of Christ. In the same way, we can imagine, Brüggemann asks us to meditate on Mary's journey of suffering.

Prayer can, as the Christian philosopher and mystic Simone Weil pointed out, be an exercise in mindfulness. Weil, who himself had a penchant for asceticism, thought it was a misunderstanding that prayer is worldly and empty – on the contrary, it is exactly through the repeated meditation on the costly that the object of prayer finds a foothold in thoughts and feelings, she claimed. Weil's claim is that if faith forces you into the world of fantasy without the possibility of being corrected along the way, the effect can be catastrophic.

Cross road is a series of meditation images, which should not convince us of faith as a saving activity, but make us understand how life-denying and destructive faith can be. It is a deeply tragic film, but also a highly topical report on the deviations from the faith, which is also echoed beyond the Christian imaginary world. In the background hovers another, fundamentalist ghost: radical jihadism. Sayyid Qutb and other like-minded interpreters of the Qur'an also provide a version of religion in which a fantasy of salvation legitimizes violence and self-sacrifice. Seen from this angle is Cross road - even if it does not affect Islam as such – an allegory of an ongoing radicalization of certain forms of belief in the bestial and the distant.

But it is also about "ritualizing" values ​​- about making what is important in our lives a lasting part of our person. What the director first and foremost wants to practice is to recognize religious hypocrisy. IN Cross road Brüggemann takes a practice of faith and turns it into a secular, religion-critical entity.