The Nun (1966)

If you look back at the for­ma­tive writ­ings of the ​‘Young Turk’ crit­ics involved in French jour­nal Cahiers du Cinéma, Jacques Riv­ette was espe­cial­ly enam­oured by the movies com­ing out of Japan in the 1950s. He wrote pas­sion­ate­ly on the work of Ken­ji Mizoguchi, whose work explores the humil­i­a­tions and degra­da­tions suf­fered by women at the hands of men, the law, insti­tu­tions and soci­ety at large. It makes his sec­ond fea­ture, 1966’s The Nun, feel like an earnest homage to the late mas­ter, even down to its at fram­ing and use of musi­cal cues which draw on Asian instrumentation.

The right­eous anger found in Denis Diderot’s 1760 nov­el makes its way to the screen in this intense and almost com­i­cal­ly bleak admo­ni­tion of the papa­cy which lands punch after punch. A cou­ple decide to offload their daugh­ter Suzanne (Anna Kari­na) on a nun­nery and coerce her into accept­ing her vows – even though she claims not to be a believ­er. What should be a life of spir­i­tu­al har­mo­ny soon turns sour as Suzanne realis­es that she has become a pris­on­er to the Church. Her descent lands her as a play­thing for the spite­ful Moth­er Supe­ri­or (Francine Bergé).

Where some of Rivette’s mid-career mas­ter­works like Céline and Julie Go Boat­ing and Out 1 are rad­i­cal and mean­der­ing, The Nun is rigid, curt and fierce­ly focused. Suzanne isn’t against any­one or any­thing, she mere­ly desires her per­son­al free­dom. Yet it seems wher­ev­er she is and who­ev­er she’s with, hap­pi­ness is the first thing snatched away from her. The film was some­thing of a cost­ly sham­bles for Riv­ette and it may have been the rea­son he opt­ed for low bud­gets and high lev­els of free­dom in his lat­er works. It does, how­ev­er, offer a fine show­case for Kari­na, who los­es her­self in the cen­tral role of a woman des­per­ate for rea­sons to stay alive.