THE NUN
With Anna Karina, Liselotte Pulver, Micheline Presle, Christianne Lenier, Jean Martin, and Francisco Rabal.
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But the hoax had an unexpected side effect on Diderot: in the course of writing one of the contrived letters, he became so emotionally involved in the real plight of Suzanne Simonin that the letter mutated into a first-person novel narrated by her, a polemic about the imposition of religious vows on individuals against their wills. To cinch his argument, he made his heroine neither a nonbeliever nor a libertine, but a devout and innocent virgin who wanted her freedom simply because she lacked a religious calling. And according to Richard Griffiths–whose introduction and afterword to the Signet edition of the novel is the source of all this background–Diderot became so passionate about the issue that he continued to revise the book over the remaining 20-odd years of his life, gradually transforming it from an attack on the monastic system to a philosophical inquiry into the matter of freedom in general. Today, it is rightly regarded as one of his masterpieces, and one of the greatest of all French novels.
Masterpiece or not, the book wound up on the Catholic church’s condemned list for both its polemics and its scandalous (if authentic) account of certain kinds of behavior, sexual and otherwise, that went on in convents. When Rivette first proposed making a film of the novel in 1962, roughly two centuries after it was written, his initial script was rejected by a French governmental committee and had to be rewritten three times over the next three years–with the title lengthened to Suzanne Simonin, la religieuse de Denis Diderot and a disclaimer added by the film’s producer explaining that it was a work of fiction–before shooting was allowed to begin. In the meantime, with financial backing from Jean-Luc Godard, Rivette had directed a stage adaptation of the novel in Paris, with Anna Karina–Godard’s principal leading lady and wife at the time–in the role of Suzanne.
Let’s start with the sound track, which is probably the film’s most original feature and its most conspicuously neglected. Influenced by the musical theories of composer Pierre Boulez, Rivette conceived of each shot in the film as an individual “cell,” roughly analogous to the musical “cell” in Boulez’s notion of “cellular” composition. As Rivette described it in an interview, “The idea was that each shot had its own duration, its tempo, its ‘color’ (that is, its tone), its intensity, and its level of play. . . . The original idea of La religieuse was a play on words: making a ‘cellular’ film, because it was about cells full of nuns.” Time and budget restrictions prevented him from realizing this project as fully as he’d hoped, but the cellular form is certainly evident in Jean-Claude Eloy’s percussive contemporary score–a striking aural tapestry of music, silence, and both natural and artificially created sound effects, parsed out in relation to individual shots and sequences.
In spite of the sympathetic heroism of Suzanne throughout, Rivette is as nonjudgmental toward the other characters as Diderot was. The villains in this story are institutions and social practices, even society itself, but not individuals; the film continually makes it clear that Suzanne’s oppressors are as victimized as she is. Indeed, it is precisely this detachment that makes the film so provocative and that clearly led to its initial banning; nowhere is it suggested that Suzanne’s plight would improve if the church merely got rid of a few bad apples. If there are bad apples, they are the institutional powers themselves.
One striking and characteristic example of this occurs in the austere church sanctuary at Longchamp when Suzanne, denounced by her offscreen mother superior as being possessed by the devil, appears to be seated alone at the end of a bench. But as a slow pan reveals an entire row of nuns seated beside her, the social dynamics of the scene undergo a profound shift. In terms of plot alone, the scene is static; but in terms of our sense of Suzanne in relation to the mother superior and to the other nuns, what we’re experiencing is highly volatile. Because the film is charting the continual struggle of a consciousness toward freedom and against a society that blocks this freedom at every turn, the overall effect of this grim story is ultimately exalting rather than depressing–and tragic rather than simply melodramatic. Surely that it is why it was banned a quarter of a century ago and why it continues to stir lethal thoughts and dangerous feelings today.
