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.
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.