The austere shadow of strict devotion objectively haunts upright ideology, as severe disciples refuse to compromise regarding life or blossoming community.
An adolescent enrages his newlywed father as he scandalously marries a teenage girl, after which he is sent to live in a religious order near the swelling sea so far away.
Life is strict and devout and disciplined but the brothers and knights care for one another, the passage of time accompanied by learning as they forge a nuanced unity of one.
Their vows are absolute however and changes of mind don't factor in, for some the endless praise and self-flagellation depressingly tedious as the years pass.
The boy, now an observant young man, loses faith with the order eventually, notably after a friend tries to escape and is then caught and fed to mad dogs.
Such an occurrence seems sincerely at odds with the Christian calling so he swiftly leaves, and heads back home to his old school castle to freely start life over once again.
But he's strictly chased by a fanatical knight who's gone mad and won't give him up.
No matter how bluntly he's adamantly rejected.
He refuses to ignore the Order's dogma.
Another more worldly priest less emphatically consumed by absolute pretensions, lives in the world albeit a holy one and attempts to reasonably dissuade him.
His arguments are simple and wholesome temperately generated by communal life, the practical observations of unorthodox realities which still humbly fit with a loving God's teachings.
He reminds the passionate ideologue that the absolute application of religious teachings, will result in collective despondency since so many people simply can't live that way.
Isn't it better to live and attempt to follow the rules as best one can, and not to seek objective justifications to punish the people who've caused no harm?
The knight can't rationally stand the friendly and curious unafraid enclaves, as he meets them in a strange country where they aren't as pious as his native land.
When he hears that his old companion the one he's too blind to see he's in love with, has taken up with his father's widow and seeks to marry her with the priest's consent, he loses his mind in the "offending" foreknowledge that his friend will live an honest just life, likely even surrounded by a loving family strictly forbidden by the Order.
Madness follows, the furious yearning to end his object of desire's fruitful bearings.
The ending as tragic as so much ideology.
As it imposes absolute calamity
(There were so many more potential friends in the Order).
(I've mentioned this before but in case there's any confusion, I'm no longer looking to get married).
Criterion keyword: dogma (I was searching for the old school "Dogma Films").
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