SOUL FOOD:

Think “Koyaanisqatsi” upside down: life in — not out of — balance. Without story, without plot, without character development, without an engineered soundtrack, its finished form seems flawless.

Like the lives of the Carthusian monks it documents, Philip Gröning’s film “Into Great Silence” moves forward with a steady, tempered rhythm.

Set in a remote valley of the French Alps near Grenoble, where the monks have lived for the better part of nine centuries, it traverses their dawn-to-dawn progression of days through an irrevocable cycle of seasons — winter, spring, summer, fall, then again winter.

Watching Gröning’s “Into Great Silence,” it was impossible to imagine he had spent two and a half years editing his work because, as he’s said, “it kept falling apart.” In its finished form the film appears so natural one could nearly believe it ordered itself.

Late last March in the midst of Lent, a small group of Catholic women invited me to come see the film with them. I went because I could scarcely imagine what sitting through the 162-minute vignette of life at La Grande Chartreuse, the motherhouse of the austere Carthusian order, would be like.

I arrived at the theater feeling sheepish. I was afraid I might feel like a voyeur nosing into the sacred and customarily invisible world of Carthusian monks. Instead, Gröning’s uncanny cinematography took me into the monastery.

In Europe, where churches these days draw thin crowds and here and there church buildings are sold and re-purposed for secular use, “Into Great Silence” — or “Die Grosse Stille” (“The Great Silence”) as the film is titled in Gröning’s native Germany — was quite surprisingly still packing theaters months after it opened in the fall of 2005.

It opened here one week after Ash Wednesday at the Film Forum in New York and drew far more modest crowds. At the 8 p.m. show at Regency South Coast Village theater where I saw the film, I counted 16 ticket holders in seats.

It was gone before I had the chance to tell you about it. But on Nov. 6, the American DVD was released, and it’s now available through outlets like Amazon.com and Netflix.

If you practice such things, viewing it would make as fine a meditation during Advent as it did in Lent. As Gröning hoped, through the film viewers do — be it in ever so slightly — experience the contemplative life of La Grand Chartreuse themselves.

At the remote monastery the monks live in tiny apartments called cells, isolated from each other as much as the monastery is isolated from the world.

The cells are windowed but sparsely furnished with a prayer stall; a small desk and table; wooden chairs; a simple box bed with a straw mattress; a wood-burning stove; a sink.

Apart from Sundays, the monks meet only in church and then only to pray in their ancient Gregorian chants. They entertain no private conversations.

They eat meatless meals twice a day. A resident layman prepares the meals, then slips them to the monks through small hatches near the doors of their cells. Most of their food comes from their own small farm.

Rising in the middle of the night to pray, the monks never sleep for more than three hours at a time. Their days are a cycle of prayer, solitary recreation such as reading or gardening, and work.

Only on Sundays and some feast days is this strict rule lifted. On these days they celebrate Holy Communion together.

They share a communal meal. They walk together in the countryside, as the weather allows, and they talk among themselves.

It’s been 23 years since Gröning first conceived of making a film about the monks’ way of life.

When he first approached the prior in charge of the monastery with the idea, the prior told him the monks would think about it.

They thought about it for 16 years. It’s a footnote to the story (told in text at the film’s end) that speaks volumes about the monks’ relationship to time.

Seven years ago Gröning finally heard from them. They were ready if he was still interested, given certain terms. Come without a crew. Shoot without artificial light.

So in the spring of 2002, Gröning entered La Grande Chartreuse to live there for six months. He kept the monks’ rule of silence and their routine of work and prayer.

By the time he left, he’d filmed 120 hours of their lives. From those he honed the 162 incandescent minutes that are now “Into Great Silence.”

Be prepared for some challenges seeing the film at home may present. As Monique Theriault, who saw the film with me, pointed out, “At the theater, you’re kind of forced to stay with it” in a way you won’t be at home.

At home, she said, when she got fidgety toward the end, it would have been all too easy to get up for a cup of tea. That sort of distraction could undermine the experiential effect Gröning set out to achieve.

“I was happy,” Theriault told me later, “that I had experienced living [like them] for three hours.”

Sue Spector, who also saw the film in the theater, remembers feeling the coarse fabric of the monks robes.

“I didn’t feel like there was a separation between me and them,” she said. Carol Zwaans shivered during scenes shot in the deep alpine snow.

“Be still and know that I am God,” commands Psalm 46:10.

Few if any of us really have the chops to live a lifetime like the Carthusian monks, who never enter one another’s cells as Gröning’s camera does. Gröning himself confessed to not rising for night prayers on occasion during his brief stay.

Theriault said she went to see the film because she has “this desire to do meditative, contemplative prayer” but struggles “with getting into the necessary inner space.” She thought the movie might help.

For her friend, Dee Wallace, the film offered an antidote to the “exhausting world we live in.” It will, she said, “forever be with me.”

Months later, moments from the film linger with each of us like touchstones. A monk feeds cats in the barn. A crocus breaks through the snow. The monastery’s red sanctuary light flickers through the dark before dawn.

We ventured into great silence and a piece of it entered our hearts.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.