CINEMA
A nun to shun
PENELOPE HOUSTON
Warrendale (Royal Commonwealth Society, 7 October and 9 December) Cold Days (Academy Three, 'A') French pop singers last year were rhyming La Religieuse with ignominieuse, film-makers were staging 'Free the Nun' rallies, and some people in Bourges wanted their town renamed Diderot because Bourges happens also to be the name of the gaullist minister who banned the film. Jacques Rivette's version of Diderot's novel is notably chaste and uninflammatory. But the ban stirred up such a phenomenal rumpus because it assembled so many elements of a classic French cause célabre: culture (Diderot), power (the minister imposed the ban over the heads of his own censorship board), and, of course, anti- clerical rancours and resentments. And now, looking slightly travel-stained, the freed nun reaches London, surrounded by edifying texts, portraits of Diderot, and assurances that they don't habitually carry on like this in French convents. The history of Lis Liaisons Dem- gereuses has been curiously repeated : authori- tarian France, it seems, still shakes slightly when confronted by its great eighteenth century rationalists.
Rivette's film is an attempt to confront the eighteenth century on its own terms, to tell the story of Diderot's much-persecuted nun without recourse to twentieth century psychological 'interpretation.' Pushed into a convent for reasons of strict economic necessity, Soeur Suzanne (Anna Karina) rebels not against the tyranny of belief but against the vast lethargy and pointlessness of the cloister. One mother superior beats her up, feeds her on scraps, con- ducts Gestapo raids on her cell. Transferred to another convent, where the nuns subsist on cream-cakes and giggles, Soeur Suzanne is sub- jected to the clinging advances of a superior (Liselotte Pulver) whose regime is sinisterly as well as comically permissive. Finally the reluc- tant nun breaks through to the outside world; to find it a gateway only to suicide.
Apart from an effectively dislocated sound track (bells, sighing winds, the splash of water), the film is unadorned : shot head-on, but keep- ing its characters at a distance and inviting a proper eighteenth century detachment. One is continually held by the notion of what Rivette is trying to do; only intermittently, unhappily, by how he actually does it. Crudities break in, fairly echoed in some errant subtitles ('Remem- ber the fate of Sister Agatha!'); small-part actors look uneasy; the nun herself, alternatively hapless innocent and sturdy upholder of her own independence, remains an idea floating at the centre of the film rather than a character imposing her identity. The approach seems to demand the rigorous inspiration of a Bresson. Rivette, faithfully perambulating his eighteenth century cloisters, can't quite liberate his notional nun from the printed page.
Warrendale, the first film to be screened by the New Cinema Club, has also had its troubles : rejection by the Canadian Broadcasting Cor- poration, which commissioned it, and by BBC 2, which found it 'too harrowing.' The Club (details from 122 Wardour Street, WI) is cer- tainly kicking off with a sensational opener, in its projected screenings of films which have yet to achieve British distribution.
Warrendale is (more accurately, one gathers, was) a residential centre in Toronto for mal- adjusted children : a bleak setting, looking rather like a pre-fab plonked down in a wintry car park, for highly unconventional treatment techniques. The centre of its method would seem to be the custom of 'holding'—adults flinging themselves upon deranged children, forcing them to work their way through a seizure and denying them any chance of retreat into solitary worlds. Youthful staff snatch hold of flailing limbs and bawl mercilessly at children whose urge to fight them off seems entirely reasonable.
One isn't equipped even to begin to comment on Warrendale's methods; or upon the psychia- tric jargon, marked by a high degree of North American solemnity, which accompanies them. Allan King's film, in any case, doesn't argue or document a case : it simply follows tell-verite style, a small group of staff and children over a five-week period. It is, undeniably, as compelling as it is painful to watch, and some close-up effects 'are extraordinary. But the audience is not, after all, in the same position as the camera- man—hasn't his professional obligation to go on shooting or watching though the emotional heavens fall. A more normal human reaction would be to turn away horn inkteding tbb
privately painful; and those films and ry pro_ grammeswhich argue that these are realities only moral cowards would evade seem to m'e to risk turning us all into voyeurs of pain, cdnnoisseurs of private misery. A tricky area, where one can only go by the feel of the film. I could be wrong, but Warrendale comes across to me as an assault on the audience's nerves rather than its mind.
In a week of gruelling demonstrations, Cold Days works obliquely, indirectly, revi- ing a war-time atrocity—a Hungarian army massacre of some three thousand Yugoslav partisans, dissidents and Jews—as four men in a prisn9 cell glancingly and incompletely remember Flashbacks to winter at Novi Sad : a great stretch of frozen Danube, men scrunching and slipping across the ice, disappearing into a blur of mist; piles of clothes on the shore, left by victims before burial. Andras Kovacs hasn't made another Round-Up, but his film has rather the same way of using circumspection to arrive at something that feels like truth. Few overt horrors; little emotionalism; a jigsaw pieced together to suggest how sane, timid men slide into collective insanity. One might well, ignobly, feel that another conscience-ridden war film from East Europe is more than one can stand; but don't miss Cold Days.
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