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"What fresh lunacy is this?" The king is a queen and the cardinal a rapacious autocrat, thus the "nationalist revival" of 17th-century France stated with a cut from ceremonial blessing to maggoty corpse. Between Richelieu and consolidation stands Father Grandier (Oliver Reed) in fortified Loudun, tending to plague victims, boffing maidens left and right, materializing as an insinuating water-walker in the sweaty visions of the hunchbacked abbess (Vanessa Redgrave). One accusation is all it takes, the "professional witch-hunter" (Michael Gothard) enters in tinted rock-star specs to conduct a massive orgy in the guise of an exorcism and the priest whose ultimate sin is political defiance lands in the torture chamber. "You've lived by your senses, obviously you can die by them." Ken Russell on Dreyer like Dalí on Millet, an astonishing mating of thematic hysteria and formal hysteria, a sustained bedlam from a poet of desecration. Protestant prisoners in avian regalia are shot for the delectation of the mincing monarch, a life-sized wooden Christ makes a handy sex toy for inflamed nuns. "You have turned the house of the Lord into a circus!" A Man for All Seasons is the main object of derangement, Marat/Sade and Fellini Satyricon are taken stock of. Redgrave's fearless paroxysms, Derek Jarman's futuristic sets, a cacophony of expressive debauchery. "You have one consolation: Hell will hold no surprises for you." The inveterate sinner turns martyr much to his surprise, his blistered dome wails from the pyre while the lass he jilted holds up their baby in an echo of Lang's Fury. (Diddling with his charred femur is the closest contact the Mother Superior has with him.) Vituperative reviewers surely did not recognize Wajda's emulation in Danton. "Tell me—do you love the Church?" "Not today." Cinematography by David Watkin. With Dudley Sutton, Max Adrian, Gemma Jones, Murray Melvin, Brian Murphy, Georgina Hale, Christopher Logue, Graham Armitage, Jon Woodvine, Andrew Faulds, and Kenneth Colley.
--- Fernando F. Croce |