© 2015 by James Clark
You have to be careful, in general, when endeavouring to track a filmmaker’s understanding of life as brought to us in his or her work. When, in particular, you come to a figure as complicated as Jean-Pierre Melville, you really have to look out for supposing that, given the violent rigors of his narratives, the male protagonists are the big news. Bob (le Flambeur), Gu (the crime idol) and Jef (le samourai) tend to eclipse mere men, not to mention mere women. But some attention to the phenomena making up the entertainments has introduced us to unexpected strengths peeking out in the form of: Bob’s friend, Yvonne (reminding us of good-hearted Claire, in Demy’s Lola); Gu’s old chum, Alban; and Jef’s sometime pet, Valeria (reminding us of Antonioni’s Giuliana, in the film, Red Desert). And if we were to come to another Melville concoction—a church saga, no less, putting some of us, by definition, into a state of malaise not so unlike what happens to others when confronted by an invention like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—with the name of the male lead, Leon Morin (a priest), occupying the title, we would, quite possibly, once again be ushered into that shell game which Melville seems to have concluded to be the best way of communicating his lugubrious and joyously promising gift.
Leon Morin, Priest (1961), having enlisted two of that era’s coolest stars, namely, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Emmanuelle Riva, positions them (in the midst of a plethora of productions from others accentuating cryptic choreography) in what at first glance appears to be a less than startlingly new vehicle concerning a battle of wits and hearts (that being enough for many critics to assume that Melville had succumbed to exigencies of mainstream market profits). But, rather than a disappointing indiscretion by a dynamite crime zealot, we might come to find this bemusing endeavor to be his true masterpiece. This putative “women’s film” under the auspices of a gold-plated iconoclast has in fact all but the obvious makings of exploding (in its own peculiar way) all the touchstones of lady-like domesticity; but making headway within its murky mineshaft is not for the faint of heart and short of breath.
A most important way, in my view, of tempering, right from the first moment, the harshness of this vehicle inheres in the film’s being conjured up as a haunting experience which occurred years ago. A woman’s steady voice, heard as a voice-over, chooses to show the onset of a most remarkable eventuation in her encountering, at sunset, on a solo bicycle ride in the foothills of the French Alps during World War II, a number of Italian soldiers (in fact the so-called Bersagliers, an infantry/marksmen unit most distinctive in the feather decoration of their headgear). Here is the protagonist’s light-hearted introduction to a trek through nearly unprecedented darkness. “I was returning from the next town when I saw a group of strange young men staring at passers-by. They wore funny little felt caps topped with long feathers. I thought they were travelling players until I saw their guns.” From out of a jump-cut she can’t help quietly laughing at the same personnel racing along a street in her town while belting out a military march. “The Occupation weighed lightly on me,” she avers, perhaps marvelling at her having ever been so nonchalant. Would the new bride in Fellini’s The White Sheik (1951), also beholding a jog-past of a Bersagliers band as she and her new husband rush to the Vatican and a blessing by the Pope, also remember bemusedly her own youthful frivolity in the form of a marriage weighing so lightly upon her that she would have to have a little fling with a Roman celebrity before that august moment at the Pope’s Palace? Or would our guide to something she can’t get over be of much sterner mettle than that earlier cream-puff?
Putting in a discreet allusion to the finer quality of our (temporarily) rustic protagonist is the richly-nuanced cinematography. We first see her on a highly textured forest road at twilight, the contrasting headlight of her bicycle adding emphasis to some kind of abyss. Such optics aside (and her attractiveness of face, body and voice), this is a sensibility as prone in her own ways to shallow and wordy self-indulgences as the little bride gushing over the tall notable. (Maybe that is why she carries the Gu-like name, Barny [and don’t forget Melville’s acuity about things American].) She is smitten by her supervisor at work (work being a mail order correspondence school) and copiously tells us about it in voice-over and also in conversation with a friend living in the same building as she. “I loved Sabine Levy… She reminds me of those beautiful young men in the scriptures, with girded loins, brandishing a traveller’s staff, a sword of fire or a wand… [This spree of loquaciousness closely resembles the bride’s loony mix of bon mots and barely sane enthusiasm. The latter’s dreamboat is the star of a series of photo-based comic books.]… She looks like an Amazon, like Pellas Athena, like a samurai. When she bends over my desk she’s like the shade of a palm tree…” In conversation with her neighbor, she carries this theme to the point of more carefully revealing a drivenness to explore frontiers of her own sensibility. She had, in voice-over, recounted how their eyes had fixed upon each other and how she was defeated in this chic intercourse, like two duellists. “I could no longer face her and I left her to enjoy her victory.” Now, at home, and unable to contain her ardor, she finds herself being questioned along a trajectory which arouses her gusto for paradox. “So you’d like to sleep with her?”/ “Are you mad? How horrifying! Sabine fascinates me because she’s like a young man, a young man with curious charms, a delicately feminized manliness… I felt compelled by her in a way that went beyond the purely physical.”
With the prompt incursion of far less amusing German troops and their martial music of a melancholy-dominant quality, poetic Barny is ensnared in the prosaic task of having her daughter, France, baptized (being the daughter of a Jewish father and freedom-fighter who seemingly has perished [the ambiguity of that situation being another wing of Barny’s Occupation weighing lightly]) and hidden away on a farm. And in the throes of such an Occupation having finally begun to bite she is drawn to another form of speculative daring, namely, taking umbrage at the do-nothing Church. Along with her neighbor, outside of the town’s venerable Saint Bernard holy site of worship, she blurts out, “I find the priest and his followers a challenge. They’re living off false currency! I’ll give them a piece of my mind…” Her reconnoitre of the presumed sheltered fat cats (Bernard’s politico-reformer legacy going nowhere in her books) involves sifting through the posted data of the three officiating figures and settling upon one Leon Morin due to his apparently obvious rural roots. “Leon, with that name, a peasant,” the born phrase-maven sniffs. “Down with Morin!” [Her tenuous husband having also been a Communist, she would of course have soaked up platitudes coming from that quarter].
To this point she has shown us her penchant for learning more about the unusual elements of life, along with a smattering of rather banal hatred toward authority. She awaits with anxiety the presumed fireworks coming up in the visit to Morin at the confessional; and her voice-over reiterates for that later life that she had put herself in what could prove to be a bruising experience. “I was nervous but there was no turning back now.” She merges into a black curtain and then tensely sits still in a shadowy, silent cell. A memorable sign of her ineptitude here is her once again blurting out, this time, “Religion is the opiate of the people,” at the moment he draws open the cloth dividing them. Her crudely bold showdown here leaves her as outmanoeuvred as she was in trying to stare down Sabine. Cool as a Jesuit, he brushes her off with, “Not exactly…” as comprising a radical consciousness trump up his sleeve. We should bring forward, right here, before we get bogged down by the no-sweat radical chic from this au courant defensive ace in clerical garb, that Leon is a lion not because he’s a bumpkin, nor a fierce dogmatist nor a smooth talker—He is that, but those factors muddy formidable assets—but because he’s packing cutting-edge cosmology which sustains a factor of big consciousness while at the same time putting him on the brink of being a far more serious threat to the Church than Barny. Leon Morin, Priest is as reflectively complex a film as we’re ever apt to come across; and the heart of its argumentative complexity only reveals itself in the midst of skirmishes between these protagonists over a dizzying spate of self-contradiction on the part of both of them. She declares, “I came as an enemy;” he declares, “I doubt that;” and, to her surprise, Barny hears the voice of moribund power subscribing to every “progressive” idea in her head. (The lavish artefacts—“All that junk should be torched” [Hit the road, Michelangelo!] Also: “Prayers are always a mockery.”) But at the same time he is certain that she should seek penance. The form of her failing in his eyes and the prescription to smarten up, however, come to be seen as strikingly secular. “You lack guts… The world would be better if you were” [St. Paul, sort of]. This leaves her in an elated mood (“I walked along happily due to the total freedom of my thinking”), even moreso inasmuch as he has directed her to return later in the day, this time to his flat next to the church. She tells him, from out of that budding kinship in subversion, “I’ll only enter a church again as a tourist.” With heresy in the air he recommends she read a book about Jesus (Jesus the Christ), by one “Karl Adam, of the University of Tubingen, no less.” And with that he lays down one of those very close to home phenomena which Michael Mann has been lobbing our way. Offbeat theology coming out of Tubingen spells one thing loud and clear for anyone having (like me, and Terrance Malick) spent a perhaps largely wasted youth on the Denken (thinking) of Martin Heidegger. Here is that Lynchian, dicey hombre from out of, wouldn’t you know it, the Black Forest, showing us in his own words where Leon is coming from and where the Karl of Karl Adam came from: “In the years after 1911, I attended still another course in theology, the one on dogmatics given by Carl Braig. There I became interested in speculative theology… During a few walks… I heard for the first time of the importance of Schelling and Hegel for speculative theology, in contrast to the systematic teachings of Scholasticism. In this way the tension between ontology and speculative theology in the constitution of metaphysics came into the purview of my inquiries.”
Leon lends her the book; she’s so hooked on its rebelliousness she reads all night; she returns to the orbit of private tutoring, enthusing. “I couldn’t put it down…Reading it I seemed to believe in God…;” she rather shamefacedly apologizes, “I was a savage…;” and the camouflaged outlaw quips, “Oh, no, it was funny.” Morin’s conquest of Barny, on the theme of “All human beings of goodwill” (“It extends beyond the visible church”), could not be more problem-fraught. And that “tension between ontology and speculative theology” is the engine putting forward for us one of the strangest and wisest films ever made. (Appearing during the white-hot moment of blue-chip contemporary film amazement, Melville’s film would have been regarded as old-fashioned. How wrong could you get?)
Much pedestrian theoretical haranguing marks their difficult, passion-soaked interplay; but one such point, in the wake of their suddenly becoming soul mates (what Mann would later choose to call “cosmic coincidence”), superficial appearances notwithstanding, lends to us the life-line dooming their jagged romance but giving a vast future to the effort, seen in pensive retrospect, by the only one who, when all is said and done, refuses to back down. “How can I believe without proof?” is how she expresses her perception that a lot of ancient grotesquerie still seems to be having its way. He counters that premium upon full-bodied, earthy experience with less than sterling polemic but also with what he supposes to be an elite pass to heaven. “If there were proof everyone would believe” [this sounding like reducing life to a treasure hunt]. “When you love someone you live without proof” [celibacy showing its downside]. Leon then reaches back to the days of his pedagogical boot camp, drawing a dot on a blank sheet of paper, her portrait, and then surrounding it with a circle. “The dot wants to encompass the circle.” But it must be encompassed by the circle.” She retorts, touching upon a prospect she has no doubt intuited without a degree in quantum physics, “Maybe the lesser can encompass the larger…” He blenches at her surmise about finite creativity: “You seem to believe in spontaneous generation.” She protests, “Of course, you, Father, have all the right arguments to make me believe in God. But atheists can find equally strong arguments for the other side.” Leon, sensing an uncomfortable stalemate, rounds out that phase of the already too academic avenue. “Probably. We should stop chatting. What good are words?”
“Can the lesser produce the greater?” asks the renegade priest, thinking to rout the newcomer who dabbles in what is to him a clear absurdity. On that occasion, Barny hopes to drop the matter as “academic.” But threaded through her specific questioning and her whole involvement with this weeks-long dialogue are issues of those “guts” he hastily concluded she had a shortage of. In fact both of them have plenty of guts; they’re the heart of their strange, indirect love affair. After that careening, her voice-over declares, “I felt more at home there than I ever had anywhere.” But an affair requires alertness, and both of them have a lot of cumbersome baggage dulling their passion for truth.
This regime of unpopular study becomes counterpointed with the wartime everydayness becoming far from a laughing matter. (For instance, Sabine’s brother is sent to a death camp, causing her to age prematurely.) Their shadowy colloquium pitched on working out seemingly abstruse troubles gets a reminder that hate and mass bloodshed have to be included. During that war of words peacefully wound down, Leon maintained, “God, first and foremost is an experiential, individual reality, different for each of us… And incommunicable.” “How awful!” she exclaims. He shoots back, “What can it matter to you?” “It’s all that matters!” she insists. Far from a precious, intellectual, stylish enthusiasm, the incommunicable becomes a salient historical dilemma, on the streets and in the priest’s sanctuary. That is to say, it reaches that degree of traction for her, intuiting as she does that batting around the knotty center of dynamics has a serious function, a function pertaining to world history. On the streets, we see the bid to construct a Nazi regime that would last a thousand years; in the study, we hear Leon rather triumphantly tell his close-range correspondent, “You live in a Christianized world” [the implication being that that motif wouldn’t have become so venerable if it lacked the right stuff; and, moreover, that its having become such a fixture confirms the Christian apparatus taking over the phenomenon of the incommunicable]. Another dimension of Leon’s sitting pretty despite toying with a wild side is the stable of Barny’s lady friends and colleagues beating a path to his door for the sake of enlightenment, an interesting slant on the Belmondo mystique.
Running parallel to this flutter, she feels compelled to bring the volatile (meditative) priority of carnality into more specific form. She declares that she’s in love with a woman (“She’s like a ray of black light”); he counters by maintaining normality (the Christian epoch), ordering her to remove the jaunty shades by which she challenges him. “I hate barriers.” Later, as he prepares to leave for a posting in a more remote parish, he’ll reveal quite a lot by remarking, “I love parish life when things go smoothly.” With their criss-crossing the theological battlefield going not very far and the implicit scandal of their researches heating up, this intimacy breaks out: Leon, prescribing a pristine habit which could break either way, “One must take life simply. Are you simple?” Barny insisting, “Why should pride be bad?” His answer—“It’s self-deception… You need a husband.”/ “I do it with a stick.” She mocks him, “Are your silences private asides with the Holy Mother?… I think what most revolts me about Christianity is its self-interest” [that dig redolent of long, hard surmising that it is he who lacks not only simplicity but guts]. One night he shows up at Barny’s place. He had dissuaded her from converting, from out of a trajectory of feeling overmatched by history, wavering in her sense that the lesser can encompass the larger. (“Now I’ve seen everything!”) Now he had to deal with that worst nightmare which her surge of compelling sensuality had detonated. He tells her about his childhood, about the beatings his mother had given him and about the overall happiness of those days. Confounding her outrage about excessive severity (which is to say, her impulse to regard much of humankind as an unfunny joke), he pulls off an insight more typical of her sensitivity. He insists that his was a happy childhood by virtue of its yield of “atmosphere.” The rich uncanniness of vivid countryside can go a long way toward tempering the ferocity of lost and good riddance relatives. And, as we shall visit soon, the atmospherics of the two compelling principals are also game changers in their own rights. Fast on the heels of this promising comprehensiveness, Morin accounts for his career choice as run-of-the-mill. “You become a priest to save souls, that’s all.” That’s all?
That’s not all and they, being at heart about daring, not safety, both know it. Barny, at a special pitch in view of his approach to her home and being a natural with her daughter, recalls the scriptural overture, “Love and do what you want” and in voice-over she declares, “But it’s killing me!” She dreams of his visiting again, kissing her and making love. On awakening with bewilderment, she metaphorically scurries back to the ascetic constructs of Christian spirituality. “Let me not offend you even in dreams!” From this point on, more and more his approach was a withdrawal of that amity deriving from her go-for-broke idealism and its coinciding with his own poised risk-taking. He had pointedly snubbed her on approaching the altar for a celebration of Mass; and now, at a second bold advance to her position, his dialogue with her anticipates a subsequent third meeting in her kitchen which plunges into the long odds of the topic of dogmatics. While he wrestles in this way with the turmoil her empirical, experiential predilection occasions [a predilection of his own but left to be, in the last analysis, gutted by a resort to sophistry and its safe, imperial payoff], he finds a way, on that second evening, to divert attention from this painful area, by chopping cord wood down to kindling for her. She cannot resist, within that soundness of their seemingly easy “cosmic coincidence,” finally asking, “If you were a Protestant preacher would you marry me?” His, as always, quick answer, “Sure,” so flippantly delivered, has never been for him a remark so ensnared with anxiety, so laced with anger. She persists in a form of “self-interest” not so far removed from that passivity of those “Sunday Christians” he lashed out against a day or two before. “If you weren’t a priest would you take me as your wife?” His answer is to bring the hatchet down to the chopping stump with dramatic force and then leave like an insulted monarch too strong to commit murder but too weak to do more than cherish “atmosphere” for its nostalgic and polemic value. Barny’s voice-over alerts us to the end-game welling into view from sterling sensibilities being roughed up by possibilities they might briefly savor but cannot maintain. “His hand, in a simple gesture, had given all and taken all away.”
The strong-man gesture of Leon, the lion, in finding an admirer to be unbearable, does sort of reignite the little bride and the big lover with a big fan club. But it more incisively resembles an end of the promise of love in another Fellini classic, namely, La Strada (1954). There another dominant guy with all the answers is far too obtuse to recognize that the spunky, discerning naïf right in his orbit has instincts which should not be consigned to militant therapy the crudeness of which he lacks the courage to confess. (After Barny’s being nearly raped by a G.I. at the end of the War, her daughter asks, “Are they Germans too?”) After a long hiatus Leon shows up at her door on the pretext of providing some wholesome literature to a parishioner in a sanatorium which Barny regularly visits. Here too, is his finding that she needs to bulk up—as he has done—on dogmatics as trumping empirical, experiential recognition. (The precious title which will presumably pull her away from error, Traditional Dogmatics and Empirico-Criticism, traces for us his migration back to Jesuitical, intellectual conventionality in face of her stirring up challenges of discernment which he (not she) lacks the guts to face. He seats her with him at the dining room table, now become a seminar carrel, but his smash-and-grab hard-sell clearly fails to take flight, his donnish monologue fading into an echo zone of her stance (ironically rejuvenated just before this in doing very mundane housework, the rhythm of her scrubbing the floor giving off a faint sign of life), from out of which she says a heretical little prayer, while glancing at the bed in the open bedroom doorway, “God, grant my wish, just this once.” In her half-dream she extends one of her hands toward him and he bolts up and backward as if he were being mugged (the optics including her toying abstractedly with a carving knife from out of his intrusion which left her with various domestic objects in play). That jet of hysteria, so palpably disclosing his desperation, includes a verbal follow-through which excitingly brings him down to the level of abusively clottish Zampano. “It’s no longer Mademoiselle Sabine… That’s progress… If only you called to God as you call to a man! That’s real prayer!”
Her voice-over in the aftermath of this ugly and stupid invasion—“My soul felt like a brothel”—brings to mind the vicious treatment of Gelsomina by an ignorant, spiritually flaccid lout. As with Barny (a clown’s name), Gelsomina suffers the murder of an encouraging and witty friend, the Fool, who continually aggravated the strongman by reminding him that he was weak in face of an ultimate matter of strength. Exploiting his own bulk (Leon is slight but, as shown by Belmondo, a reflexive brawler and ruthless opportunist along lines of socioeconomic advantage), Zampano also has a de facto slave, ordering her to act on time and to get lost when he has something more gratifying on tap. Though Leon has put Barny on course to discover a best in herself that becomes better than his best (a best she will honor him for, for the rest of her life), he readily puts her on a leash so short and inconsistent that her progress to serious lucidity is compromised. After the tongue-lashing he orders her to show up for confession later that day, at which time he grants her speedy absolution by her repeating after him how sorry she is for having offended God. But on the way to a promised peace of mind that leaves her puzzled and disappointed (“I went almost in peace’ is her struggle to show her best face in an infantile situation), he manhandles her by way of discussion—dogmatic priorities very much in effect. At confession she says faintly, “I don’t have the words for it.” He prods her with, “You’re acting like a dead branch. Know what they get?” She whispers, “Yes.” He marches her along with, “What do they get?” Barny says, her face registering the virtual imprisonment she has backed into, “Cut off.” “And once they’re cut off?” “They get burned.” This striking dovetail comprising Leon and Zampano carries the remarkable upshot of the latter brute eventually, though way too late, attaining to the dignity of remorse for what a disgusting coward he was (Recall his tag line, “Anyone with a weak heart better not look”), while the former can only rattle off smugly about seeing her “in the next life.”
On the heels of those far from personal best remarks about the menace of a contract his firm specializes in, Leon announces that he’s transferring to the less stressful, more malleable clientele in a remote rural village. The War being ended, Barny is also about to leave town, to continue work at “correcting assignments” (a bemusing, benign occupation of the correction centre she has bought into) at the original digs in Paris. Their farewells leave us with an instance of interpersonal depth re-establishing the work in total as belonging at the very top of the pantheon of early 1960s film treasures. Her residual goofiness and his residual timidity behave themselves to allow a rich sunset of the energies each has expended upon the other. Making her way to his quarters, now stripped of books and nearly everything else, she is caught up in the desolation of wind blowing through the flat, clattering the shutters and the door having been left ajar as if attentions to details no longer matter. Leon eventually puts in an appearance from out of clattering things in the bedroom and greets her wryly with, “Anchors away!”—a flash of Breathless promiscuity in the draft of Hollywood wartime escapism. Barny is in no mood for musical comedy, her voice-over noting the few dining utensils which constitute the sum of his possessions. “So this is all he owned…” She says she wants to help him pack and Leon steps on another verbal landmine. “It’s done. It’s all there…” For a change there is genuine feeling—sadness—in his eyes. She wonders about the piano he would dip into when the spirit (of sensual rebellion) would drift in. “It was rented. They took it away. I wouldn’t have time to play it anyway.” Barny can’t help saying, “That’s sad.” He can’t help saying, “No, I’d only make holes in the reed…” With tears in her eyes she thinks to cut short a painful experience. “I’ll be going. Thank you for everything.” He tries to hang on to the cosmic coincidence he knows full well will never occur again in his lifetime. “No questions for me this last evening?” [Unable, even here, to stop giving answers]. She tries to smile and says, “I’ll have them all my life, so it’s better to keep quiet…” He prevails upon her to sit down and go over any trouble spot she wants to bring to light. So off she goes, like Gelsomina, creating a flutter for fun and profit. “You say the Jansenist were heretics. Why? What about the Holy Thorn Miracle?” [This coming from the biggest thorn in his side he ever encountered]. That Jansenism (in contradistinction to Leon’s bookish Jesuitism) had to do with dispensing with mush-ball atonements and facing straight-on the virulent (wilfully ignorant, popularly sustained and cleverly, respectably hidden) decadence of humankind is met at this moment of nearly essential wit with that magnanimity so thrilling for both of them in those early days fast fading. “Why shouldn’t God perform miracles for heretics? Does he love them less?” (Belmondo’s range of sensibility spanning smug criminality and charming grace is on a magical plane here, as is Riva’s vast accommodation and vast rebellious skepticism.) She lets him have it one more time—“Under your guidance I’d come to imagine God as Catholic’ [not a fan of near-Protestant Jansenist agents]. Just as Zampano could at last eclipse his show-off days, Leon now finally cuts the sheep dog game. “Let’s call him the Universal Catholic, in our secular language. It doesn’t mean he can’t be many other things too. You know what our Lord said, “In my father’s house there are many mansions.” Barny, being Barny, continues, “Contradictory mansions?” He brings things to a close with reminding himself that the free-lance life is not for him. “Maybe. But the contradictions are mainly in our mind, Monsignor Mole!” Barny stands up and, trying to be appropriately matter-of-fact, declares with a world of self-control, “This time I’m leaving for good.” Then there is his, “Until we meet again” that is almost a foreign language; she calls it “a figure of speech.” She goes downstairs unsteadily, opens the door to the street, places a hand on the ancient stonework to steady the moment and her face allows all that is lost to appear. An apt last vision is of Leon at the landing above those stairs, high and mighty despite all the real magic.
There are a few instalments of ravishing perception—cinematic and dramatic—that need to be noticed in filling out an appreciation of Barny’s dilemmatic future and filling out this strange and dazzling film (serving notice, in its simply having happened, to subsequent hype from others on the order of daring, powerful, brilliant and important). France begins by announcing, due to her being billeted with Church-goers, “I know everything now. Now I know who made me. He’s got no body but that’s OK…” Barny is far less pumped up along these lines; but she smiles and takes it all in stride. Encountering the priest in her home the growing child peppers him with an issue of sufficiency (and its carnal dimension) that her mother also has taken to quite naturally, namely, “What did God do before he made the world? Nothing?” Leon tells her, “We can’t know these things.”/ “We’ll never know?”/ “We’ll know when we’re dead.”/ “Then I want to be dead…” Making a sort of quantum leap on the grounds of those questions, she declares, “I want a prayer that doesn’t exist… A prayer no one knows. Why keep telling God the same things?” Leon, pretending to read from a Church document, confirms along this thread of caring how agile and elegant his reflections could be. “They ask you for that so much that you must have no more. Give one, Lord, which you have left over. Give me what is refused. Give me what others don’t want. But give me courage and strength, too.” In his jibe, “Saint Joan of the Hatchet,” within the fateful time of chopping wood in various ways, we have a trace of the harsh besiegement which that putatively cute prayer entails for Barny. Going against big numbers where public safety is at stake constitutes a sentence to a form of isolation which can be tempered but never put out of order. From out of her anguish in being assailed for attending to a degree of sensuality Leon does not allow himself to partake in (beyond theorizing—his way cool beret, which he pops on his head on concluding his little execution of her as planted on a wooden dining room chair, being some kind of joke in face of the urgent intensities which she has engaged), she tells him he must have to borrow sins from others in order to be onside with mere mortals. He shoots himself in the foot in replying arrogantly, “Some get off lightly.” (Some move from getting off lightly within the Occupation to bringing down on their head something very heavy.) That activates the scene (during the long silence after he left so scandalized) of sparkling summer light during a walk by her in the country where other assets were in play and she fondly imagined that he would be down in the valley doing his best in one of the churches. Neither of them, it transpires, gets off lightly; but in being swept away by a riptide of popular panic the saga of Barny paradoxically becomes, in some ways, quite unforgettable.
This is one Melville film I have not seen, though I have always vowed to watch it. Just seeing Belmondo and Riva is reason enough. Congratulations on a stupendous piece of scholarship.
Thanks for your enthusiasm, Frank.
Your bringing to the prospect of viewing the energies of Belmondo and Riva is a fertile step. Melville is a consummate surveyor of what can be learned from other filmmakers and other performers (despite his irascible public track record of finding everyone he worked with not worth noticing apart from the shoot). Those two stars’ early and separate triumphs, in Breathless and Hiroshima Mon Amour, become grist to the mill for his wide-ranging reflections. For instance, we have here Riva and her “light” Occupation; and we also have Riva recently involved in a light Occupation in the form of a romance with a German soldier. How does each incarnation handle the challenge of maturity? How do we find ourselves challenged to improve?
Another stupendous review Jim!! I have a very high regard for this film, which I can frame here as a poetic faith-affirming character study that deals with some difficult questions without offering answers. Beautifully filmed and acted by Belmondo. One of my favorite films about the clergy with DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST, WINTER LIGHT and I CONFESS. One of Melville’s most unusual films, but no less brilliant for it.
Thanks, Sam.
Your well-considered sense of this film as a “poetic faith-affirming character study” bringing to bear “difficult questions without answers” is, I think, an excellent take upon this “most unusual” of Melville’s films.
Whereas Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest conveys a jet of extreme passion overcoming skepticism, Melville’s Leon Morin, Priest conveys a historical evolution in reflection to overcome skepticism. This latter “most unusual” of film endeavors is accomplished by virtuoso cinematography, screen writing and acting.
Leon’s improvisation of the ways of prayers no one else wants and Barny’s perseverance with that area of “spirituality” constitute, I think, not only a film about the clergy but a film about the depths of world history. I’m amazed by what this work attempts and accomplishes!
Fantastic write-up! I have not seen this yet but some of the quotes here are awesome.
Thanks so much.
Melville’s film is indeed not simply a cinematic tour de force but a writing accomplishment to rival the likes of Proust.