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The theme is from Forster, worked out "at the back of the beyond" by The Archers at their most carnal-bonkers-sublime. The old harem is perched on the edge of the Himalayan precipice, turning it into "the House of St. Faith" is the mission accepted by the Irish Mother Superior (Deborah Kerr) and her Anglican order. Quite a challenge for sanctity: Howling winds up above and drums in the bamboo jungle below, plus the hirsute thighs of the sardonic government agent (David Farrar) to erode the resolve behind the pale habit. The cloister with clogged-up plumbing, the bejeweled Little General (Sabu) and the wayward odalisque (Jean Simmons), the vegetable patch turned dazzling flower garden. "Either ignore it or give yourself up to it." Bresson has the Occupation in a convent (Les Anges du Péché), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger hint at the galvanic twitches of a dissipating empire. (The natives are paid to attend school, the skeletal holy man and the child translator with the knowing smile are revolutionaries old and new.) A tremendous studio incantation, Rumer Godden's India as a trompe-l'oeil procession of painted mirrors and process shots, vast planes of artifice for the mind in utter upheaval. Jack Cardiff's Technicolor photography maintains a Vermeer light frequently unsettled by violent Bonnard blues, softly fading to black only to cut to a screen full of flaming peonies. The blur of dread and rapture is embodied by Kathleen Byron's magnificent gaze of desire, her tormented nun donning scandalous reds for a foretaste of Hammer horror. Mallarmé's bell-ringer and Murnau's vertiginous angles for the climax, the fever may break but "I shall have my ghosts to remind me." A work not just of sights and sounds, but of fragrances and tremors. There are loving shrines (Kundun, The Darjeeling Limited) and gleeful demolitions (The Devils), and then there's Roeg's grand analysis in Walkabout. With Flora Robson, Jenny Laird, Judith Furse, Esmond Knight, May Hallatt, Eddie Whale Jr., Shaun Noble, and Nancy Roberts.
--- Fernando F. Croce |