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No Greater Love (2010)

Director: Michael Whyte

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From Time Out London

Tucked away just off Ladbroke Grove, the Carmelite Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity has been there since 1878, but only now have cameras been allowed a peek inside. The result is a gently reflective portrait which unobtrusively records the daily lot of this cloistered order, but doesn’t really dig much deeper than that. Unfolding against the passing seasons, the film quietly observes Carmelite nuns as they carry out devotions and domestic chores alike, maintaining a vow of silence relaxed only during official recreation time. The buzz of a chainsaw in the garden, the ‘chinnnngg!’ of an iMac start-up and the rumble of nearby traffic noise are reminders of the modern world, but the liturgical rituals and soundless prayers hint at the sisters’ daily engagement with another realm seemingly beyond our reach.

A quartet of impeccably articulate senior nuns voice their opinions on prayer as ‘a place where God can come and speak’, but also hint at their struggles to keep the faith during years when they’ve felt alone and unanswered. Such vulnerability humanises them for a moment, as do the amusing incongruities of eco-friendly washing powder or jaunty folk dancing. Mostly, though, there remains a benign distance between subject and viewer, which director Michael Whyte’s modest, somewhat passive approach is unable to breach – no match for the palpable cinematic transcendence of ‘Into Great Silence’, Philip Gröning’s monumentally framed 2005 study of the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the Swiss Alps. ‘No Greater Love’ knows what spirituality looks like but, pleasantly calming though it is, can’t really take us inside.

Author: Trevor Johnston

Time Out London Issue 2068, 8-14 April, 2010

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User reviews of this film

Lesley Croome said...

Posted on May 02 2010 09:39 We are enabled to follow the sequence of the convent day from the wake-up call at 5.20am to the evening vigil at 9pm and the offices of the church centred in Holy Week and culminating in the celebration of Easter. Between services and periods of silent prayer, the nuns are at work: on their knees polishing the chapel floor, on-line ordering food from the supermarket and engaged in the different processes that go into the making of communion wafers from which their livelihood is partly derived. As they walk purposefully down the corridors in their black habits illumined by shafts of light from the high windows it is a truly medieval picture but we also see them with their habits tucked up, overalls on, at work in the garden, planting, harvesting and pruning recalcitrant shrubs with a noisy electric saw. I commend the way in which the film has been cut - solemn moments, like the burial of one of their sisters, are held for just long enough before there is a switch to something more everyday, avoiding all sentimentality.
The inner life of the nuns is revealed in several interviews. In one the Prioress explains very simply and touchingly that while still at college she could hardly wait to be ordained, but that it was18 years before she truly felt that God loved her as she loved him. She strives to describe her dark night of the soul as accurately as she can. There is something about the forthrightness of the nuns when speaking that belies their gentle demeanour and conveys the sincerity with which they speak of their experience. One can feel with them in the moment and that is particularly why I wish to see this film again.
_Lesley Croome_

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Maria Lancaster said...

Posted on Apr 12 2010 17:30 This is a wonderful film which goes very deeply into the contemplative life of contemporary Carmelite nuns in London. I found it instructive, moving and sometimes humorous too. It stands alongside 'Into great silence'. Both are masterworks in their own right, showing the masculine and feminine aspects of contemplative life. I would like to see it again.

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