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The Nun
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A Difficult Soul
Jacques Rivette (1928-2016) almost missed out on
benefitting from the entire, public phenomenon of the Nouvelle Vague – even
though he was, as a core member of the Cahiers
du cinéma crowd, such an integral part of it. His first feature, Paris Belongs to Us (Paris nous appartient) began production
well before Claude Chabrol’s early films, François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and finally
Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960)
pounded this New Wave into the minds of audiences in France and well beyond.
However, due to infernal complications, its completion and release were delayed
until the end of 1961. Then his second feature, The Nun (or, more properly, Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse de Denis
Diderot), went through an even more protracted birth cycle:
beginning as a 1960 play (adapted by prime Nouvelle Vague screenwriter Jean
Gruault) from Diderot’s novel, Rivette directed it first on the stage in early
1963, and then began the long haul of getting the necessary resources together
to make it as a film.
This time, alas, finishing the work in 1966 signalled
only the start of the real problems faced by Rivette and his adventurous
producer, Georges de Beauregard: in the face of well-organised protests from
religious quarters, the ‘Commission of Cinematic Control’ (!) banned the film
from both local and overseas exhibition not once but twice – a ban only
overturned in 1967. Rivette was duly amazed to see that his rather discreet,
chaste – albeit extremely powerful – film could ignite such a scandal in the
mid 1960s.
All this is to say that Rivette – like his Nouvelle
Vague travelling companion Éric Rohmer, and also like the innovative Jacques
Rozier (whose masterpiece Adieu
Philippine was shot in 1960 and released in 1962) – was a rather untimely figure within the French cinema
of the early to mid 1960s. He had not only effectively missed the Wave but,
when he finally got back on his surfboard, what he delivered to the world was a
(to some) puzzlingly old-fashioned, classical film – more like the tragic
historical melodramas of Otto Preminger or Kenji Mizoguchi (two directors he
had praised as a critic during the 1950s) than anything Jean-Luc Godard was
doing in his rambunctious prime.
The Nun is untimely in another, properly
Nietzschean sense, too: it is only now that the film is reborn in a carefully
restored version, over fifty years after its sign-off date, that we are able to
truly appreciate its greatness.
Rivette was always, in an intuitive and unselfconscious
way, the most feminist member of the Nouvelle Vague’s all-male auteur crew at Cahiers; that much became patently clear
with the release of Céline and Julie Go
Boating in 1974. But The Nun hits
with an anti-patriarchal wallop that was launched well before its time, and
waiting for our time to really make direct contact: the tale of Suzanne
Simenon, this “difficult soul” (as she is described) is one long, sustained
wail of pain and frustration concerning an endless ordeal of abuse and manipulation.
It is not 'men' who are so much the problem (some of the women here are A-grade
sadists, too); rather, it is the various institutions (church, law, family,
convent) that unfairly position some people with power (when they scarcely
deserve it), and others forever without it.
Suzanne is a victim of every system going, beginning
with a largely unspoken moral-social code that deprives her of money, autonomy
and freedom of choice. But she is also someone who never ceases crying out
against injustice, revolting with her whole, soulful being against injury and
indifference.
This role gave Anna Karina a special opportunity (her
hubby of the time, Monsieur Godard, had financed the stage production which
also starred her), and she made the absolute most of it. Karina was both
blessed and cursed (then as now) with the tag of icon or emblem of the Nouvelle
Vague; almost everyone who cast her (including Luchino Visconti, Tony
Richardson, even Rivette himself in the wonderful musical Haut bas fragile [1995]) exploited that association, and rarely
required of her to play an individual character of any depth. The Nun is the shining exception to that
rule: in every respect, the role shows what she’s capable of as an actor.
The 25-year-old Jacques Aumont, writing the rave Cahiers du cinéma review for its October
’67 issue (no. 194), put the matter of The
Nun’s aesthetic orientation firmly and correctly: far from opting for
“non-modernity”, Rivette had detoured around received wisdom concerning what
constitutes cinematic novelty in order to arrive at “one of the two or three
most innovative films” of its time. Crucial to the film’s staggering formal
coherence is Rivette’s approach to the soundtrack: with composer Jean-Claude
Éloy and editor Denise de Casabianca, he went through the entire film and
mapped its holistic “score” for music, direct sound recording of voices, and
added noise effects (bells, birds, wind …). The result is a stunning example of
what filmmakers now routinely call sound
design, on par with what only a few truly audiovisual directors (such as
Ritwik Ghatak) were doing at the time. The model of serial music (in the
Karlheinz Stockhausen tradition), with its intricate interrelation and
patterning of parts, informed the film at all its levels: Rivette joked that he
conceived it as a “cellular” movie about people imprisoned in cells.
Rivette would again take up much of the iconography of The Nun, and its agonised dance of
emotional and sexual relations, years later in Don’t Touch the Axe (2007), adapted this time from Balzac. But, in
the immediate context of the film’s release in 1967, Rivette declared he had
been “utterly bored” by the often tedious process of realising such a
thoroughly pre-planned project, and had already made a bolder leap into the
void: with the long-form, largely improvised, very contemporary film-and-theatre
game launched in L’Amour fou (1967).
That particular milestone, which would set the
experimental parameters of Rivette’s art for the following 15 years, now awaits
its imminent digital restoration, thanks to Véronique Manniez-Rivette,
Les Films du Veilleur and Éditions Potemkine. Cinema is indeed reborn, over and
over!
MORE Rivette: Va Savoir, Out 1: Noli me tangere, Lumière and Company, La Belle noiseuse © Adrian Martin January 2019 |
