the world comes
thrusting in behind
by Douglas Messerli
Michael
Powell and Emeric Pressburger (screenplay, based on the book by Rumer Godden
and directors) Black Narcissus /
1947
The British were tired of seeing war pictures
when Black Narcissus suddenly
appeared upon the screen. And having just gone through the privations of the
war, there seemed to be no better tonic than this larger than life, richly hued
fable about the Himalayas, which coincided with Britain's leaving India and the
recognition that the British Empire had finally crumbled.
It's
notable that Powell and Pressburger's interpretation of a Rumer Godden Indian
romance is the polar opposite of Renoir's only four years later. For Renoir
there was no choice but to film in India, creating, as I suggest below, almost
a travelogue of that country. The River
is all a bathe with golds and blues and greens, mostly natural colors. Powell
and Pressburger, on the other hand, surprised their cinematographer and editors
by announcing they would shoot their film entirely in England. The great
landscapes of the film are paintings on glass, the palace into which the nuns
move is a miniature. The exotic, hand-painted rooms are a product of the
Pinewood Studios. The natives are played by local dock workers.
A
member of an Anglican order of nuns whose mission is primarily to teach and
nurse girls and women, Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) is ordered to take four
other nuns into the Palace of Mopu, previously used as a house for the local Indian
General's wives, located on a Himalayan mountain top. The natives live below,
unable to bear the strong winds and rains of the Palace, a fortress previously
abandoned by an order of religious brothers. With little else but determination
and gut, Sister Clodagh battles the prejudices of her own peers, the skeptical
and often practical criticisms of Mr. Dean (David Farrar), the dizzying
insanity of the harridan caretaker (May Hallatt), and the elements as she
attempts to maintain order and spiritual values in a world that is literally
and endlessly falling apart.
Suffering from a malady described as Darjeeling tummy, with white sores
appearing upon their arms, effected by mountain light-headedness, the nuns
attempt to teach, nurse, garden, and pray with little effect. Sister Philippa
(Flora Robson) works as hard as she can, but falls prey to long-lost memories,
culling up images she has supposed she has long ago buried. Instead of planting
beans, potatoes, cabbage and other products that might sustain the order, she
cannot resist filling the small patches of palace soil with numerous varieties
of flowers. Already ailing before she has come to the order, the somewhat
paranoid Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) becomes sicker, imagining that her fellow
nuns, particularly Sister Clodagh, are plotting against her. The nurse, Sister
Briony (Judith Furse) asks to be sent away to another convent.
Having fallen in love with Mr. Dean, Sister Ruth refuses to take her final
vows, ordering the dress in which she suddenly appears in one of the film's
last scenes. Rushing to Dean's small cottage, she enters just as he has gone
out, she picking up personal apertures of his life (his pipe, etc.) to sniff in
the aroma in which she hopes she will soon be enveloped. Upon returning, Dean
assures her that he is not in love with her, is not, he insists, in love with
anyone, suggesting she return to the palace or be accompanied to Darjeeling.
Rejection by the only person she has thought cared about her can only result in
madness.
Returning to Mopu, she attempts to push Sister Clodagh over the wall
into the valley below, but as in many such a melodrama, ends up falling to her
own death.
Powell
also uses Brian Easdale's music to great effect, playing out on horns and drums
incessant rhythms that at times almost make the film's viewers think they might
have gotten lost in an African jungle instead of the Indian Himalayas. Hokey,
yes, but effective nonetheless. This is after all melodrama in the manner of
what Douglas Sirk and Nicolas Ray would create in the US a few years later.
Finally, despite the over bright daytime skies, Black Narcissus might be described as a film that is satiated in
black and red. Although these nuns are dressed in white, their habits are often
splattered with blood, their hems covered with mud, and their rooms haunted
with dark shadows. One of the most powerful scenes of the film occurs after
Sister Ruth has abandoned of her vocation, her adversary, Sister Clodagh
offering to sit out the night with her in prayer and contemplation, Ruth
dressed in her store-bought red dress, applying bright red lipstick to her
previously pale lips. As the Mother Superior drifts off into sleep, so does her
charge dart away in escape.
In short, Powell's and Pressburger's Black Narcissus is not that very
different from their later movies The Red
Shoes, The Tales of Hoffman, and even their final notorious masterpiece, Peeping Tom, incorporating movement, music, and image to convey larger-than-life
psychological situations, conveying worlds in which what the characters say
matters less than the movement of their bodies and the rhythms of their lives.
Los
Angeles, April 6, 2012
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