Austere hushed black-and-white modern, with behind-unfriendly seats, the Austrian Cultural Forum is, you know, an appropriate venue for the screening of Jesus, You Know/Jesus, Du Weisst. Not because it offers diametric contrast to the film's sparsely lit but gold-highlighted Baroque interiors, altars and chandeliers, but precisely because the church settings, with their simple exteriors, are rendered minimalist, center-screen stripped of curlicues that would distract the senses.

Jesus, You Know is essential story, yet the actions are internal and spoken. There is no dramatic situation as normally conceived, for these houses of God are deserted except for the lone speakers; only one other attendee is glimpsed, tangentially and for a second, and three or four choral interludes are brief, stark and unsubtitled. Instead, six people -- the one couple among them “pray” separately -- speak frankly to Jesus, Lord Savior and also friend, confidant and psychiatrist. The camera as altar Crucifix is center and some fifteen degrees above so that, even shyly looking down or fumbling for words, the half-dozen supplicants are symmetrically center-screen, peripherally framed by imposing architecture only subliminally to be noticed. Their confessions, complaints, pleas, come to reveal deeper truths as the thoughts-given-voice addressed in effect to us, too, uncover a common thread of loss of love and the awful loneliness of the individual soul.

The “You Know” does not imply omniscience but, rather, is “y’know,” a hemming-hawing interjection habitually meaningless but here extended -- Du being the familiar form, as against the formal Sie -- to imply intimacy, a personal dependence on and relationship with Deity. The assertion that the “fundamental idea . . . should show people in personal conversation with Jesus” is disarmingly too little, for this self-proclaimed documentary goes beyond that in delving into the psyche, into the Why of prayer. Neither extremist nor sectarian, these simple believers open themselves with excruciating frankness, some to have their faith witnessed and recorded, others convinced that it is the will of Jesus Himself.

There is irony in the frequent steady shots of artwork, the Son on the Cross or opening His heart or glorified amidst golden rays or dandled by His adoring Mother, for His painted or sculpted face remains immobile and gives no answer, as the subjects occasionally whine. Austrian director/co-scriptwriter Ulrich Seidl was intended for the priesthood by his father and mother but rejected parental authoritarianism, parochial boarding school and the Church’s hypocritical double standards, yet “I know that I carry the fundamental ideas of Christianity within me.” Though he is better known as an award-winning documentarian and cinematographer, the seeds of this particular film can be traced back to his first fiction feature, 2001's Dog Days/Hundstage, a similarly fragmented if more openly sardonic exposé of brutal obsession and sadness among middle-class Viennese during a summer heat wave.

Like that earlier work, Jesus, You Know is inventive within its deliberate effective austerity. It's also ironic -- and in spots brilliant. Agonizing in revealing cri de coeur solitude, it is a film that stays with one yet is difficult to sit through and will prove unwatchable in its eighty-seven-minute entirety to most audiences.

Church cleaning lady Elfriede Ahmad prays for renewal of understanding with her stroke-affected TV-addicted Muslim husband and two children; older Waltraute Bartel seeks to justify revenge on an adulterous husband, reflects on a father's death agony and fears yet wishes for her own; student Thomas Ullram laments his family's lack of appreciation but ends up disclosing fantasies of heroism and women; nattily dressed Hans-Jurgen Eder mourns estrangement from wife Brigit and their daughter, while a young couple seek to reconcile her (Algelika Weber) earthly dreams of family commitment with his (Thomas Grandegger) of monastic dedication.

On second or third or fourth appearance, these real-life subjects reveal themselves further, as complexity and other reasons within, and behind, bubble to the surface. One is struck with the insecurity, loneliness and need for self-justification of these six (and by implication, each of us). Bold in conception and realization, this story of theirs is narrated, dramatic without dramatic structure; a good film, excellent in ways but depressing in the overriding sadness of its achievement, Jesus, You Know will not please or “entertain” the many. 

(Released by Leisure Time Features; not rated by MPAA. German with English subtitles/)