Die Nonne

Imagine being sent to a convent against your will. Imagine taking a religious vow in which you don't personally have faith. Imagine discovering that the treacherous currents of guilt, power, control and sex remain every bit as relevant within a nunnery as outside of it. Such is the tragic predicament in which the film's titular nun finds herself in this handsomely-shot - if not entirely well-executed - adaptation of 18th-century French philosopher Denis Diderot's controversial novel.

With the family coffers drained for the dowries of her two elder sisters, Suzanne Simonin (Pauline Etienne) is sent to a convent. She has no desire to be there, and makes that known to the kindly abbess who takes care of her. When her benefactress mysteriously dies, convent life rapidly becomes all the more complicated. Suzanne finds herself treading far murkier waters, her wellbeing completely at the mercy of the cold, unforgiving Supérieure Christine (Louise Bourgoin) and the overly attentive Supérieure Saint-Eutrope (Isabelle Huppert).

For much of its running time, The Nun explores Suzanne's plight with a steely depth and determination that's fascinating to watch. There's an icy tension to her confrontations with Supérieure Christine: these are rife with politics, power and drama, as the flock of nuns dutifully turn against Suzanne with the capricious menace of school-children on a playground. Etienne is wonderful throughout, playing Suzanne's rebellious spirit as convincingly as she does her moments of surrender and despair.

It's when the usually magnificent Huppert appears on the scene that The Nun stumbles badly. Huppert's character is drawn in broad, garish strokes, with none of the depth, complexity and subtlety of which she is so very capable. Almost laughably, Supérieure Saint-Eutrope appears to be little more than a fickle, amorous gargoyle leeching on the younger nuns in her charge.

Perhaps that's partly the point - it could be a tip of the hat to the fact that Diderot's novel started out as an elaborate practical joke on a friend, rather than a genuinely impassioned treatise on the state of the church. Even so, the shift in tone from considered to campy is abrupt and, ultimately, too much to bear.

If it were up to her that is. Bad jokes aside, this is based on a novel that has already seen an incarnation (no pun intended) in movie that was made in the sixties. I can neither relate to that movie or the book, since I haven't read or watched those. But I can say that I can relate to our main character here. And who would not be able to? Being forced to do something you don't want to, is something everyone has had to go through in different variations.

I do wonder what the church is saying about this, although it's obvious that the blame goes to single persons instead of everyone. The structure is pretty neat, with someone reading what happened and us being thrown into that mix. Great sets and costumes and a very well acted (underplayed) main role. Sometimes the devil is in the detail ...

I am a fan of Diderot by way of Rousseau. And his novel was interesting in the letter based structure. It quite forward thinking for its time, in that while the Enlightenment was directly challenging many statistic and institutional ideas, very few Enlightenment writers were including women in their considerations.

That said the user reviews here and especially the professional reviews are a bit overwrought as a result of leaving out context. Firstly almost all people were locked into vocation, virtually never of their own choosing, as everything about their life. Certainly married women were, and subject to control and violence that makes anything in "The Nun" pale by comparison. So too was just about anyone else for most of human history. Either overtly owned or tied to the land and their "station' and subject to warlord or state violence for for chalking that. Certainly in mid/late 18h century Nuns were eating better (no small thing in world were people regularly starved to death), were safer in almost every way than most other people, certainly than the great majority of men, who were much more likely to be inducted into the military as cannon fodder.

Again, the 1966 version is better, and better yet is the novel.

In 1966 ,when the first version of Diderot's novel was released, there was an outcry :the Church insisted that the movie be called "Suzanne Simonin,la religieuse de Diderot ". Half a century later ,history did not repeat. The Catholic Church has seen worse.

Nicloux 's remake is not in the least inferior to Rivette's work ; it's downright different from it ,and with the exception of Micheline Presles, has a more convincing cast : Pauline Etienne, in the tradition of Catherine Mouchet ("Thérèse") , is a more credible tormented nun than the beautiful but inexpressive Anna Karina ; she shines in the scene of her vows where one feels her confusion and her human hesitations .Ditto for Isabelle huppert ,one of the best living French actresses,who effortlessly outshines Liselotte Pulver in the thankless part of the homosexual mother superior who falls madly in love with unfortunate Suzanne who has not got a clue but knows that there's something wrong in this ,to put it mildly, disconcerting relationship .Nicloux smartly uses the old French ditty from the seventeenth century "Mon Père M'a Donné Un mari" (= my father gave me a husband) , which denounced the drama of the numerous daughters married against their will .When the lesbian mother superior reprises the song , she identifies herself at Suzanne's husband ;Huppert is only supporting ,but she blows everyone off the screen in her scenes.

Neither Rivette nor Nicloux was faithful to the end of the novel : after escaping from the convent ,the heroine was desperately looking for a job as a governess or a simple servant in a castle ;the book ends with a PS that augurs badly .The former director gave a pessimistic tragical denouement.

Nicloux ,on the other hand ,developped an aspect of the novel : Suzanne is an illegitimate child ; Diderot who was an atheist , made the mother a hypocrit who thought that,by giving her daughter as an offering to God, she was able to wash her sin away. Some space is given over to this affair which leads to a (relatively) optimistic conclusion : the wonderful pictures of the nature in the last sequences,sharply contrast with the place were Suzanne was "buried alive".

... given the age of the story - but this disappoints on other fronts as well.

Firstly, the Dickensian "let's drag everyone through misery until the deus ex machina ending" is just too well-worn for me, but could have been OK if the execution were more interesting on the way. Sadly, I was bored quite often, waiting for something to happen (or just not to see again something already well-signposted) and some of the acting (sadly including Huppert's turn here) was just not very convincing.

Ultimately, a nicely-shot but (for me) too-familiar tale of the crushing power of systems and the risks of resistance. Others may have more fun with it.