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The Nun [VHS]

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Initially banned in France in the 60s, this film version of Diderot's shocking novel about a young woman forced into the nunnery is considered the most traditional of New Wave master Jacques Rivette's oeuvre. But it is compelling, visually beautiful and poignant. The film is greatly abetted by the superb performances of the sterling cast-- Micheline Presle as the kindly mother superior, Liselotte Pulver as a lesbian nun and Anna Karina, Godard's muse and then wife, in the title role. Karina's performance is unforgettable,making this film one of the important achievements in French cinema.

Anna Karina, Jacques Rivette's then wife, stars in this many tiered expose of social and religious norms in 18th century France. Anna Karina's striking beauty and smoldering sensuality are in full bloom and yet since she is an illegitimate daughter she is treated like a burden by her parents who want nothing more than to be rid of her. The convent is the easiest solution. And for Karina the convent is an especially cruel fate as she has grown up amid the most opulent surroundings. In the first scene of the film we see beautiful Karina being coerced into taking vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience. She rebels against the bizarre rituals she is being forced to take part in and is returned home but slowly she is coerced by both family and church to enter the convent. And the convent turns out to be just one long torture for her. Once there she is told she must surrender all individuality but the more they try and subdue her the more she fights back and since they can't convert her spirit she is soon being punished with more and more severe physical depravities. She applies to be released but the civil authorities fear doing anything that will upset the very powerful church authorities. Finally one sympathetic clergyman allows her to be transferred to another convent.

Convent #2 is absolutely a world apart from the first convent. In fact it looks like the 1960's in this new locale as all the nuns wear beads and dress each according to their taste and sit hand in hand singing songs. This new convent is as liberal and permissive as the other convent was strict and disciplinarian but Karina soon finds out that convent #2 has a few irregularities of its own--like night visits from a wanton mother superior. Karina's beauty seems to be her curse. Karina confides to the parish priest about her fears of the mother superior whose intentions she only partially understands and the prieswho knows full well the mother superiors inclinations helps her escape. Once free of the convents walls however the priest also tries to accost her. The religious institution failed her in every way and society proves just as unkind. She is soon taken under the wing of a nice woman who feeds her but that woman turns out to be a madame of a brothel and the last scenes of the film show Karina yet again forced to take part in yet another bizarre ritual.

A very powerful film which stays with you days after seeing it. I believe ultimately it is a story about how elusive a thing true freedom really is.

Though Jacques Rivette is equated with the French New Wave his films are not marked by the quick cuts and time shifts and collage quality of other New Wave directors. Rivettes style is slow and meticulous with very long takes. Some New Wave film makers emphasize spontaineity by speeding things up Rivette does just the opposite--he slows things down and the effect of his very long scenes is that you have time to think and focus on things much more intently, perhaps even meditatively.

The story is of Susan whose two older sisters have been married off. But Susan will not be married off because she was the product of a brief infidelity. Her presence is a constant reminder to her mother of that infidelity so she wants to be rid of her if only to clear her conscience. So Susan is coerced into becoming a nun. At first she refuses her vows but soon she sees no other way. Rivette painstakingly shows the inner torment this beautiful girl of 19 goes through as she is told she must vow to poverty, obedience and chastity for life. One understanding older nun helps her along but soon that only friend passes away and since Susan is not as docile as the others she is soon at odds with everyone in the convent. The Mother Superior tries to tame her with tortures and cruelties but Susans will is not broken. Finally her petitions to be transferred are accepted and she is off to convent number two. This second convent is idyllic, the sisters are much more liberal and much less severe, unfortunately for virtuous Susan its also a hotbed of sapphic activity. In the first convent Rivette showed us Susans rebellious side and in this new setting he shows us another side of her, her pure and innocent side. Rivette is studiously showing how conventions both social and religious shape people(or try to) and what blunt(and corrupt) instruments they prove to be especially when a true individual comes along and confronts them and refuses to be shaped by them.

Lastly there is Susans attempt to live in the outside world. But brought up in such cloistered surroundings and never having been given a proper education about the ways of the world and given the limited options available to women in 18th century France she is thoroughly unprepared, she remains an innocent though a thoroughly unique one to the end. The ending is abrupt. Rivette is never sentimental, he is matter of fact. He presents his scenes like facts and lets his viewers come to their own conclusion. Fascinatingly told story from a fascinating film maker.

Jacques Rivette's La Religieuse (The Nun), 1966 is the adaptation of Denis Diderot's novel (1760). The movie tells a harrowing and simple story of 16 year old Suzanne Simonin (played by incredible Anna Karina), who is forced by her mother to enter a convent where she undergoes a lot of suffering including beatings, humiliations, semi-starvation, lesbian attentions from the Mother Superior (charming Liselotte Pulver of Das Wirtshaus im Spessart) and attempted rape by a priest. Made by the acclaimed New Wave director, "The Nun" feels more like a traditional (in the best meaning of this word) film, linear, poetic, moving, and very sad. Even before the film was completed and shown to the viewers, the association of former nuns and the parents of students in "free" schools demanded a banning order. This film was met with great controversy upon its release and was banned despite initial approval. Ironically, the scandal had benefited to the increased interest for the novel - many copies of Diderot's book were sold following the banning of the movie. Despite its controversy, the movie is not so much a criticism of the Catholic Church but more a condemnation of the society in which a woman had only two choices allowed by her family - marriage or the convent.

This is an unjustly forgotten film. It's one of Rivette's best films (only his 2nd film), and it's immensely powerful, moving, and rivetting, even today. Jacques Rivette is one of the least known of the French New Wave. As another reviewer stated, Rivette's films weren't really in the same vein as the other New Wave filmmakers were. Where Godard and Truffault were prolific (putting out a film a year, sometimes 2), Rivette took his time and put out a film every few years. And Rivette's films are much longer than Godard's or Truffault's (Rivette's longest film is the 12 1/2 hour Out 1, which, until recently, was impossible to see. It's been screened in its entirety several times in the last couple of years).

The Nun is based on a Diderot novel, and it's a massive indictment of the upper classes of France. Anna Karina is essentially forced into a convent because of her father's debts. To avoid debtor's prison, they "sell" Anna to the convent. Her life in the convent is filled with anger, resentment, jealously, all of those things on the outside world, but seem to amplify when in a small world like the convent. It's a depressing, bleak, powerful film. While it's not like Rivette's later work (which dealt with relationships and theater), it's still a brilliant work, reminiscent of Dreyer's later work in terms of its long takes, pacing, subject matter, and mise en scene (the term mise en scene literally means movement in the scene, and Rivette still uses that phrase in the credits of his films). It deserves to be better known, along with its creator, one of the most maligned filmmakers in French history.

LA RELIGIEUSE (THE NUN) is Rivette's second feature, not finished and shown until six years after his first, PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT and not given a significant release until the following year - and even then, banned from being shown to anyone under 18 in France and completely banned in French overseas possessions.

What was all the fuss about? There's no nudity, no strong language, no violence to speak of -- what got the French censors up in arms about was in fact one of the harshest attacks on organized religion - or at least on Catholicism as it used to be practised in France two centuries earlier - ever filmed. La Religieuse, based on an unfinished 1780 novel by Denis Diderot, is the story of Suzanne Simenon, a young woman in the problematic circumstance of being forced into convent life because of her mother's transgressions and her father's failures in business, and her attempts to escape this situation, which as you might imagine required much effort in the 18th century.

Suzanne, played in an extraordinary performance by Anna Karina, is in fact quite pious, virginal, innocent and naive; she seems to be fairly intelligent and musically talented; but she is also very independent, and for all her real and honest belief in God, cannot submit to the structured life and rigorous discipline of convent life. At first, she is somewhat comforted by a kind mother superior who admits to having had some of the same problems of having no vocation - of having no particularly feeling for monastic life. But her kind and understanding leader soon dies, and is replaced by a rigorous and intolerant young woman who despises Suzanne - despises the slightest bit of nonconformity - from the first. Suzanne's life becomes intolerable, more so even when she writes to a lawyer to try to be freed from the convent; eventually some pity is taken on her once it is learned how badly she has been treated (shunned, given no food and no change of clothes, not allowed to pray) and that her mother superior is possibly deranged - and Suzanne is moved to another convent.

This new location is problematic in its own way, though - at first it seems lively, carefree and joyous, but Suzanne soon becomes the object of a different kind of unwanted attention from the young and very sexual mother superior, and finds that here too, "freedom" is completely impossible. Karina manages to show the slow progression from complete naiveté to adult understanding - and despair - without ever seeming to lose faith in her God, though she may be losing her belief in humanity. It's a powerful statement made mostly in the eyes, a curled lip, shoulders - there are a couple of manic scenes, but they are never overdone or overlong; we get what we need to understand a spirit in torture. When, finally, she does manage to make an exit, she finds that life on the outside world for an uneducated and moral young woman without money is no better, and Rivette finishes the film, and Suzanne's life, the only way possible...

Most critics will remark that this is Rivette's most conventional film, and so it may be on the surface; the narrative is very easy to follow, the scenes are quite fluid and the editing fairly simple, the storyline lacks any of the fantasy, whimsy, or narrative play that most of his other films are full of - but look closer. Certainly this is the director's most overtly political/socially critical film - though even here it is careful in its balance. Suzanne is not an atheist, does not hate the church; she simply does not belong in this life and the film's anger is at a society and a religious organization that doesn't care about her feelings or even her life. It is anti-totalitarian, not at all anti-spiritual.

The structure of the film is quite remarkable as well, though its most obvious innovations or experimentations are with sound rather than image. The score is a modernist, percussive and often harsh one, and the sounds of nature, of the world outside the convent walls, are often powerfully amplified. Inside is only the life of rules and orders, to be followed without question - outside are birdsong, the howling wind, bells and horses' hooves on pavement. Most scenes are composed of a single shot, typically a minute or two in length; Rivette's original design was to have both sound and image mimic the monastic cell, though the end result didn't work out exactly as he had hoped. Still, he and his collaborators, most notably composer Jean-Claude Eloy and the sound department headed by Michel Fano, create a world terrifyingly powerful in its ability to destroy a body, if not a soul, and yet still exist as a false and beautiful incentive, never to be grasped by a young woman without hope or ability. The further from her initial jail-like surroundings she gets, the more she finds that she only eludes one kind of prison for another - and the further we go in the film, the harsher and angrier the music and the aural surrounding become.

Like every Rivette film I've seen, this improves on multiple viewings; I first saw this on the first release of the complete uncut film in the USA in 1990, later again video, and a third time just now. Though I'm sure some will be put off by the subject matter or the depressing storyline, anyone with an interest in this great director and certainly anyone interested in the plight of women in film - Rivette's model in many ways in this film is the work of proto-feminist Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi - should really see this. It stands with the best of the New Wave, and Karina's performance proves that she wasn't just the pretty face that she typically is in Godard's work.

Not available in the USA on DVD, but with two separate releases on VHS, and with Rivette still rather poorly represented both here and in Europe, it may be worth buying used in the old format - who knows when a decent DVD release will surface?