THE NUN (68)

Directed by: Jacques Rivette (1966)

Starring: Anna Karina, Liselotte Pulver, Micheline Presle

THE NUN'S STORY (61)

Directed by: Fred Zinnemann (1959)

Starring: Audrey Hepburn, Peter Finch, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft

The Pitch: A young woman becomes a nun, but finds it increasingly difficult to conform to the various strictures of convent life.

Theo Sez: What have we learned from a double-bill of two-and-a-half-hour films about nuns, screened in a single five-hour chunk? (a) Filmmakers are awed, and a little baffled, by the impossible sacrifices demanded by life as a 'bride of Christ' ; (b) The critical rep of nun movies is roughly commensurate with how far they feature (or don't feature) sexual repression and hysteria (see also BLACK NARCISSUS) ; (c) If I never see a two-and-a-half-hour film about nuns again, it won't be a moment too soon - though both of these are actually quite good, even Zinnemann's Hollywooden version. Obviously STORY is more sympathetic, the essential difference being that its heroine chooses to become a nun (whereas Karina in THE NUN is forced into it), but even here the Mother Superior admits a nun's life may be "against Nature" - and the film is, technically, a study of failure - just as Karina is urged to "Let Nature die within you" as a first step to accepting her new life ; both films are also episodic and elliptical, concentrating closely on one period then leaping across Time to the next, though Rivette uses duration cleverly (e.g. telescoping action at the very end, when our heroine leaves the convent, to suggest a kind of disaffected wandering) while Zinnemann's travelogue-y style - see also THE SUNDOWNERS - works against him (one often feels it takes longer to set up a location, esp. in the African scenes, than it does for things to actually happen there). The big advantage in STORY is of course Hepburn, who can really project spiritual gravitas - Karina comes off more like a supermodel trying for Serious Actress cred - yet, incredibly, God is almost wholly absent from the Hollywood slab o' religiosity, and much more present in the controversial, condemned-by-the-Catholic-church NUN. Rivette is strong on historical background, all the stuff about convents used by parents as a useful prison for keeping daughters till they reached marriageable age - or the opposite, a place for daughters they could no longer afford to marry off - but also insists on Karina's own love of God, literally to the final moment (the "freedom" she longs for isn't freedom from religion, just the right to be treated as a person rather than a chattel) ; Zinnemann, on the other hand, never quite explains what drew his heroine to become a nun (rather than a nurse) in the first place, since she never shows significantly more religious feeling than your average small-town 50s girl - all the emphasis is on "obedience" to the rules (silly-sounding rules, like not drinking a glass of water without permission or not talking during the Great Silence), as if being a nun were a bit like being at school (or boot-camp in the early scenes, though the firm-but-fair Mother Superior does give our postulant heroine a motherly smile as she's doing her penance). Guess you could say THE NUN represents ascetic, existentially-minded European Catholicism - with attendant sexual repression - whereas NUN'S STORY stands for diluted, mass-market American religiosity ; the first is heavy going but absorbingly tormented, the second well-crafted but fatally vague. Bottom line: if you're going to make a two-and-a-half-hour film about nuns, do remember to include some mountain landscapes and Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes in my opinion.