THE STORY – In Jacmel, on Haiti’s southern coast, the sea, the churches, and the spirits shape everyday life. Marie Madeleine is a free woman. She lives from prostitution and moves through the nights without submitting to the rules of those who claim to save souls. When her path crosses that of Joseph, a young believer deeply involved in an evangelical community, a relationship forms between these two beings who seem to have nothing in common. As Joseph begins to waver in his faith, Marie Madeleine draws him into a world where desire, belief, and the search for freedom open a space where everything can be reinvented.
THE CAST – Géssica Généus, Béonard Monteau, Melissa Mildort, Edouard Baptiste, Ginou Jules, Gaëlle Bien-Aimé & Luchue Mesidor
THE TEAM – Géssica Généus (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 103 Minutes
The biblical story of Mary Magdalene is one steeped in complexity and controversy. For some, she’s directly connected to Jesus’ inner circle, a woman of great virtue and intelligence. For others, she’s a whore, whose prostitution was ameliorated in connection with her spiritual guide, eschewing her ways and concentrating again on the bodily yet nonsexual concerns of the man from Galilee. Writer-director Géssica Généus’s “Marie Madeleine” explores these contradictions in the portrayal in her moving film.
Set in the sleepy town of Jacmel on Haiti’s southeastern coast, the story follows the titular character (played by Généus), a boisterous sex worker making a living under extremely dangerous circumstances. Quick to drown her troubles with a drink, and even quicker to draw out a blade concealed in her cheeks for emergency purposes, hers is a hard life, but one still filled with laughter, even if done as a coping mechanism rather than from unabated joy. In contrast, Joseph (Bernard Monteau) is the son of a preacher. Immaculately coiffed, his carefully selected shirts and officious demeanor speak to the strictness of his father’s order, the angular lines of his figure masking a more tumultuous interior that’s tightly restrained.
After a medical episode in which Marie collapses, causing Joseph to come to her aid, the two craft an unlikely friendship, mirroring their contradictions and recalling gnostic interpretations that bifurcate the natures of the biblical characters. When Joseph’s domineering father, Jacques (Edouard Baptiste), opens a church directly across the street from the brothel Marie calls home, the setting is ripe for conflict.
Thankfully, Généus refuses to let her story simply fall back on clichés that practically scream to be used, and it’s her deft ability to subvert these expectations that gives the film much of its power. Certainly, some broad narrative strokes are telegraphed early on. Still, the gentle manner in which the characters intermingle and the performances’ almost documentary-like realism allow even the broadest of circumstances to come across as verisimilar.
Handsomely lensed by Nicolas Canniccioni, there’s a palpable humidity on screen; a suffocating visual motif that mirrors the challenges each character must navigate. Despite being the oddest of couplings, it’s a deep friendship, and the way both Joseph and Marie influence each other makes for a richer, more revelatory character piece.
As the more melodramatic elements come to the fore, the film loses its way, and its ending is both necessary and entirely predictable. Still, this is offset by the sense that these contradictions aren’t simply between these two individuals but also speak to the larger elements of Haitian culture as a whole, one in which religion, respect, tragedy, and triumph have intermingled for centuries. Bold colors and emotions intermingle, and it’s in this heightened environment that the two characters exist that the more subtle, human elements come to the surface.
Powerfully acted, with a storyline that’s at once universal and deeply specific, “Marie Madeleine” succeeds by navigating these many contradictions and, in doing so, paints portraits of three-dimensional characters in ways that are both rare and remarkable.
