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The opening is a précis, forced rites on a barred stage before an uncomfortable audience. The lass is an aristocrat's illegitimate daughter tucked away in the severe convent, "your days will be, if not happy, at least endurable," Anna Karina incarnates her with a mixture of delicacy and frenzy worthy of Lillian Gish. The Mother Superior (Micheline Presle) is kindly but not long for this world, her replacement (Francine Bergé) terrorizes the novice to the edge of madness. Incarceration, scraps from a dog's plate, tatters. "Die and be damned! Amen." Paper and ink for her confession become the instruments of a memoir, her longing for freedom is seen as a possession in need of exorcism. From dungeon to dungeon, "is not every state thorny?" A transposition of Life of Oharu disguised as an adaptation of Diderot, Jacques Rivette crafts 18th-century stateliness only to pierce it with modernist shock. (Rossellini's Vanina Vanini figures distinctly in the technique.) "Une âme difficile" pushing against the limits of existence, stone walls and creaking floorboards add to the overwhelming sense of materiality, a deliberate academicism jangled by scarlet suffusions and amplified bells. Hell of captivity, faith in rupture. "This robe has attached itself to my skin, my bones." Fairy-tale stepmothers in contrasting castles, the second abbess (Liselotte Pulver) presides over a ticklish sorority and pays possessive attention to the new arrival. Plaisir d'amour on the harpsichord, atonal clanging in the air. Commiseration at the confessional with the monk (Francisco Rabal) who sees existential chains, they escape together and the wolf under the cowl promptly emerges. A stark flow with a brusque stop, "bien long et bien triste." A model composition for Polanski (Tess), Davies (The House of Mirth) and Von Trier (Dogville). With Christiane Lénier, Yori Bertin, Catherine Diamant, Gilette Barbier, Jean Martin, Marc Eyraud, Charles Millot, and Wolfgang Reichmann.
--- Fernando F. Croce |