A Religiosa

From the first few minutes the movie seems too plain and boring. There are only two scenes which take up too much time and do not explain anything completely. The plot is silly, the music is unsatisfying. Don't recommend this for watching to anyone.

Denis Diderot wrote La Religieuse (The Nun) in 1780 and the power in this story remains intact in this screen adaptation by Guillaume Nicloux (who also directs) and Jérôme Beaujour. Diderot was a radical freethinker, rejecting conventional dogma and associated himself with some of the most enlightened philosophers of his age. His books were burned and Diderot himself served three months in Vincennes prison in retaliation for his attacks on the conventional morality of the day. Some of his books were considered so radical that they were banned until after his death.

The story takes place in France, in the 1760s. Born to a bourgeois family, Suzanne (Pauline Etienne) is a beautiful young girl with a natural talent for music. Despite her faith, she is dismayed when her parents send her off to a convent, expecting her to become a nun. Suzanne first resists the rules of the convent, but soon finds out that she is an illegitimate child, leaving her no other option than to pronounce her vows and suffer the consequences of her mother's sin. She soon wants to escape the religious path and is trying to revoke her vows when the Mother Superior, who had brought her comfort and solace, dies. Her successor, Sister Christine (Louise Bourgoin), turns out to be a sadistic and cruel Mother Superior, inflicting the worst forms of humiliation upon Suzanne, such as depriving her of food and clothing. Suzanne is finally transferred to another convent, where she discovers another kind of Mother Superior (Isabelle Huppert), who develops an inappropriate affectionate bond with her. The story is one of a woman trying to resist imposed religious values, revealing the dehumanizing effect of cloistered life.

Pauline Etienne is radiant as Suzanne and as always Isabelle Huppert delivers a riveting performance. The costumes by Anaïs Romand are especially fine as is the musical score by Max Richter. This is a superb film on every level.

... 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.

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.

La religieuse is an interesting account of the life of the recluse who seeks a life of serenity, away from the distraction of the world only to find themselves amind cruel, pitiless and sadistic individuals who use religion and the name of God as an excuse to inflict pain on others. Prior to watching this adaptation, I have read few pages of Diderot's novel, and I can say that the movie does justice to the work, and now that I am continuing the reading, I can vividly picture the scenes of the movie, along with Pauline Etienne who gives life to the character of Suzanne Simonin, as i read through the pages.