An Encounter with Simone Weil by Julia Haslett

How do we deal with someone else’s suffering? Simone Weil, a mystic and philosopher from the early 20th century, chose to share in other people’s distress as the only way of coming to terms with it.

Born to a middle-class Jewish family, Weil struggled her whole life to understand and feel human pain. She first got in touch with the communist party, without joining it but engaging in the workers’ struggles - to the point of quitting her teaching job in Paris to work in a factory for a while. After volunteering in the Spanish Civil War against Franco, she started to feel more and more attracted by Christianity, as she saw in Jesus the supreme example of sharing in human suffering. During War World II, she limited her food intake to what she thought was the quantity people were eating in occupied France, and eventually died in 1943 after refusing special treatment for tuberculosis.

67 years after Weil’s death, American documentarist Julia Haslett engages in a quest for her moral legacy, acknowledging her moral superiority and empathy. Although she lives in completely different times, suffering is also a big component of Haslett’s life, whose father committed suicide and whose brother is afflicted by severe depression. She is very honest in putting her own life, and that of her family, in this documentary; but the film is too much of a declaration of personal purposes to be really effective.

Furthermore, Haslett easily mixes together the personal pain coming from inner conditions, such as depression, with the struggles resulting from exploitation, war, and hunger. Without making any distinction and creating some bizarre narrative solutions - such as hiring an actress to see if she can “become” Simone Weil so that the filmmaker can talk to her, the documentary ends up being an unwanted moral lesson. And the dismissive tone towards those of Weil’s family who lived their normal lives without following Simone on her quest for suffering is just irritating.

by Marta Musso