|
The "moral certainty" of faith as distinct from the "false currency" of religion, sorted out in provincial France during the Occupation. Ineffectual Italian soldiers are glimpsed on the side of the road with comical feathered hats, machines roar in the middle of the night before Gestapo troops march in. (A bluesy trumpet later announces Yank liberators seeking their libidinous reward.) The young widow (Emmanuelle Riva) fancies herself a militant with an anticlerical streak, she steps into the confessional to start an argument and finds herself in the first of many debates with the unconventional curé. (That it's Jean-Paul Belmondo in the tight surplice adds a growing note of erotic longing to their theological meetings.) Borrowed books, a sudden touch, the tools of "citizen priest, comrade father." A courteous but tenacious dialectic, exquisitely laid out by Jean-Pierre Melville with novelistic detail and delicate ruthlessness. Life during wartime is sketched with a characteristic lightness of touch—Resistance fighters step out of hideouts to attend their children's baptisms, the tiny daughter (Patricia Gozzi) has a crush on a friendly German sentry, the Jewish professor (Marco Béhar) goes underground not with dread but with a gleam of adventure. Staring contests with the imperious secretary (Nicole Mirel) who presides at the office "like a samurai" (cf. Dargelos in Les Enfants Terribles), a mighty smack for the collaborationist coworker (Irène Tunc). The center belongs to the heroine's Kierkegaardian leap and carnal struggle, her spiritual tête-à-têtes emerging as a companion piece to Le Silence de la Mer. (Howard Vernon turns up for a brief moment to clinch the link.) The disused chamber and the stumbling street, high and low stages for the final meeting. "We call that the workings of grace." The influence on Rohmer's Ma Nuit chez Maud is palpable. With Gisèle Grimm, Monique Bertho, Monique Hennessy, and Gérard Buhr. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |