POLISH FILM FESTIVAL: An atheist from an early age, I nevertheless fell early and hard for Black Narcissus, and developed a deep fascination with nun movies, a genre with more than its fair share of masterpieces: Bresson’s Les anges du péché; Fred Zinnermann’s The Nun’s Story; Alain Cavalier’s bone-dry, ascetic Thérèse; Walerian Borowczyk’s sordid, exuberant Behind Convent Walls . . . I draw the line at The Sound of Music (too merry), but otherwise, show me a wimple and I’m there.
Poland of course has some form here, both with the religion and the genre. And if this particular effort, from veteran writer-director Barbara Sass, never quite reaches either the artistic heights or flat-out weirdness of Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s classic Mother Joan of the Angels (1961), it’s not for want of trying.
The best convent flicks are essentially irreligious, studies in isolation and collective hysteria, and in this respect Sass delivers handsomely. She has an impatience with dogma—the notion that Mary was truly a virgin is briskly dispensed with—and a fascination with power structures and collective dynamics, as befits a filmmaker who came of age under communism.
Thus, in an unnamed Polish town, a young woman, Anna, has fled a traumatic upbringing to seek shelter at the local convent. Whether that decision is motivated by an actual spasm of faith, is a question the film wisely chooses not to resolve: ultimately, Anna’s reasons remain private. What is clear is her hunger for transformation.
Unfortunately, the Mother Superior—whose tattoos hint at a similarly chequered past—is a fanatic, given, between fits of self-flagellation, to relaying regular communications from the Holy Mother. And in Anna, she quickly discerns an empty vessel, ripe for Satanic occupation. Prone to nightmares, the girl is quickly set apart from her peers, told again and again that she is marked for something momentous, and that the secular world is a thing only to be avoided. And sure enough, every time Anna does venture out to run an errand, she’s instantly endangered—almost run over by a passing lorry, or forced to sidestep lines of soldiers, constantly marching to and fro.
But then, following a dispute with the local prelate, the Mother Superior begins to sever all ties with the 'corrupted" church, insisting on the ideological purity and strict isolation that she claims is necessary to achieve a true understanding of God. She also introduces a new priest, Father Franciszek, as radical as herself—though rather more hands-on with the girls.
From here, proceedings descend swiftly into chaos, as the company (including a dubious Anna) hole up in the church, refusing all contact with the outside, and their rituals become increasingly debased. In one feverish scene towards the end, the assembled nuns gather in the sacristy and begin to sway and moan and even whirl like dervishes, until the gathering begins to resemble another, equally potent example of a godless hell on earth: the amateur theatre workshop.
One could of course see all this as a metaphor, a way of addressing not only the Catholic faith, but the very nation of Poland itself—torn as it is between the temptations of modernity and the burdens of tradition, and suspicious of an outside world that so often has betrayed and despoiled it.
Handsomely shot, by Wieslaw Zdort, in a diffuse light that’s largely drained of colour—so much so that, for the church interiors, everything appears to be modelled in various shades of ash—it’s a smart, if slightly worthy production. The cast is mostly strong, Anna Radwan (as the self-mortifying Mother Superior) in particular. Only Michel Lorenc’s score is an irritant, telegraphing every emotion and lapsing too often into wordless, sub-Dead Can Dance moaning—far better, the occasional flourishes of Vespers, sung by the cast.
The novitiates are all young, attractive and lithe, and prove (initially at least) to be a giggly, fun-loving bunch, constantly playing pranks and climbing into each other’s beds—such lapses from piety hinting at 'nunsploitation’-style hijinks that this film, sober to a fault, never delivers.
The best convent flicks are essentially irreligious, studies in isolation and collective hysteria, and in this respect Sass delivers handsomely.
