beauty the destroyer
by
Douglas Messerli
Jean
Gruault and Jacques Rivette (screenplay, based on the novel by Denis Diderot),
Jacques Rivette (director) La Religieuse (The Nun) / 1966, general release 1967
Jacques
Rivette’s 1966 picture La Religieuse (The Nun), based
on Denis Diderot’s novel of the 18th century, is really four major
episodes patched together into a full film. It’s not precisely that the work
does not weave together these parts, but that despite the fact that they all
center on the adventures of a young innocent, Suzanne Simonin (the always
radiant Anna Karina), but that they offer such entirely perspectives of the
period that they are difficult to reconcile.
Indeed, perhaps I should say there are
actually 5 perspectives, beginning with the seemingly loving home life of the young
beauty, which once her elder two sisters are married off with large dowries—a
requirement of the day—leave nothing for her, which means for the family that
she will have to be sent off to a convent wherein she will nicely disappear
from their consciences.
Surely there must be several books on how
second sons and third daughters throughout the 17th-19th
centuries were horribly destroyed by the fact that their wealthy parents simply
couldn’t afford to marry off and support their younger children.
Dozens of novels and plays deal with that very
fact, usually leading to comical (in the case of Tom Jones) and tragic results of the financial dealings of the
gentile lives of their parents. As if they were all “drunken sailors,” parents
had to determine what to do with their later offspring whom they simply could
not equally support. In a sense, that is even at the heart of many of Jane
Austen’s fictions. When marriage equals money, it produces serious problems
even up until the 20th century when in Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles, the temporary husband of the heavy-drinking
Bette Davis is forced to play a billiards game in order to settle the matters
of the dowry. Even the peaceful family drama of I Remember Mama must pretend to deal with such issues. Women quite
obviously needed to be sold off to their husbands, and younger sons were truly
a nuisance. Only if you were the heir apparent might you expect to receive a
decent survival in a world, particularly for women, it was not a nice place if
you didn’t have cash to spend in it.
What is worse is that the beautiful, well
raised Suzanne, like Tom Jones, is the product of an illicit romance her
religious mother, in this case, has had with another, unnamed man. Her guilt
about her actions is confused with her intentions to send her daughter into
hell—supposedly a life in a highly religious convent—in order to resolve their
financial difficulties and absolve her own guilt.
Suzanne, given her careful upbringing, is
deeply religious young being; but also is a proto-feminist, who resents the
very idea of being sent off, to what Los
Angeles Times critic Justin Chang has described as a true prison. As Chang
beautifully described the second perspective of this movie, it “might be one of
the greatest prison movies ever made and certainly one of the most
controversial.” For that is precisely, after the young girl, dressed in the
wedding dress young novices must wait to wed their lives to God, rejects, declaring
that she has no vocation in her commitment to religious conviction, which is
perceived as a scandal—after all, her mother has also had to pay (through
secretly pawned jewelry) for her entry into the convent! Everything in this
world is based on financial transactions, which might truly remind us of the
world in which we currently exist.
Her white knight is the improbable
lawyer, Dom Morel (Francisco Rabal), who warns her of what she will have to
endure if she brings a lawsuit to escape the clutches of her prisoners. He even
fortells, as what we later perceive is far too true, that she may not win her
claim to the world. The society who has locked her up is determined, for numerous
reasons—hypocritical morality, financial concerns, and simply dispassion—to
keep her where she is. And, moreover, the social structure does not easily
accept change, while the radical changes she has demanded are essential to the
current French culture, with only a few outspoken figures attempting to totally
transform the culture in which they exist. One must imagine an outspoken
philosopher, if he or she might still exist, speaking out against the
imprisonment of blacks or the immigrant children in our own time: their voices
might be loud, but they are seldom heard. Suzanne loses her case.
Fortunately, or one might proclaim
“unfortunately,” Morel helps the suffering Suzanne to escape to another
convent, this one a seemingly loving enclave, where she is treated as a kind of
special supplicant to the Mother Superior, Madame de Chelles (Liselotte Pulver), a
lustful lesbian who is determined to take the new beauty under her personal “wing,”
while others, obviously comfortable in this Sapphic paradise, rush laughingly
around one another with joy, behaving nothing like women devoted to God. Only
Sister Thérèse, the former favorite of Madame de Chelles warns the new member
of their order of the dangers she must face.
The young innocent nun is confused—by everything,
her newly aroused feelings of joy and contentment, her own personal commitment
to the religion, and, of course, her own inability to find vocation within the
confines of the life she has vowed to live. Confessing to the local monk, she
is advised to stay far from the truly “Satanic” influences of Madame de Chelles
(strangely a term that had previously been applied to herself). Is she Satan or
is Satan present in the world all around her? She has no way, apparently, of
even comprehending evil.
Sent away through a complaint by the
Mother Superior (or perhaps by his own tender feelings for the nun to whom he
must attend) the elder confessor simply disappears, a new, younger monk taking
his position, a man who confesses to his confessor that he feels very much in
the same position a her, locked away in a religiously sanctimonious society in
which he does not feel at home.
What also becomes quickly apparent to
everyone but Suzanne herself is that he too has fallen in love with her,
forcing her to keep a distance from her Mother Superior while he plots her
escape. For people like us, he confides, there is only escape or a jump into
suicide, re-planting the seeds of what Suzanne has already imagined for
herself.
Suzanne agrees to his plot, but quickly
realizes, when he attempts to rape her, that her actions have been for no
avail; that he simply plans another kind of imprisonment for her. And indeed,
when his plot is revealed to authorities, he, himself, is imprisoned. She has
no choice but to again escape, this time into the indenturement of a cleaning
woman for a provincial French household. The newspapers and gossip of the day
warn her even away from this rustic world, and she choses to run again, this
time into the poverty of the streets, begging for a few coins in order to
survive.
Once more she is seemingly saved by a
passing figure, a well-dressed woman who takes her home in order to protect
her. Suzanne is once more pampered and given a beautiful dress to wear until
she realizes, at the evening party, that the role she has been chosen to play
this time is a courtesan in a high-class bordello. The approach of a customer
forces her again to flee, this time through the window her previous monk has
suggested to her death.
Yes, this is a true melodrama, but it is
also an amazingly well-wrought and beautifully filmed New Wave protest against
religion, and most particularly, the Roman Catholic Church. Faced with serious challenges
by French censorship authorities, Rivette worked time and again to bring the
language into a context that did not threaten the church leaders, even adding a
ridiculously long introductory statement which expressed that this was, after
all, a fiction and did not represent the way the Church had in any way truly
behaved.
All lies, of course, and in a later 2007
film, The Duchess of Langeais, this based on a story by
Balzac, some of the same territory is repeated, since the major figure of the
work is also incarcerated and tortured in a convent. Religion, we know, has not
always been the best source of protection for its believers. Ask the thousand
and young men and women preyed upon by priests, or the masses of innocents who
have gone to their early graves believing that what the Church spoke was the
Holy Word of God.
Even though Rivette had the permission of
the censors, when he movie was about to open, the French press and religious
figures shouted it down. Only in Cannes did it finally receive a fair hearing,
and even then did not appear in Paris theaters until the following year.
Just
as importantly, Rivette’s film is not only about religion but about the restraints
put upon women, then and now. Suzanne may have never been quite able to comprehend
her role as an outspoken representative for her sex—she was clearly just as
uncomfortable in the ordinary world as she was in the world of the sacred—but
she knew something was wrong, that being forced into a role in which she didn’t
feel comfortable to embrace, she was being robbed of her identity. Diderot,
long before Rivette, realized that. Instead of being asked, she was being told
how to behave and survive in a world not at all accommodating to her own
sensibility. And she rebelled against the very idea, again and again, with no
choice finally but to destroy herself in the process. The “MeToo” movement, and
numerous other contemporary issues all seem, in this film, too close to bone to
watch it comfortably. This is an edgy movie even today.
Los Angeles,
January 22, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (January
2019).
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