Leon Morin, Priest
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville
April 17-23 at Film Forum
Runtime: 115 min.
It’s as if someone said, “Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest isn’t juicy enough. Put big actors in it. Get that sexy Belmondo guy from Breathless and Emmanuelle Riva, the hot chick from Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and have the two of them talk religion, slyly flirting and exploring the limits of sacred and profane love.” Thus Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1961 Leon Morin, Priest (now showing in revival at Film Forum) came to be.
This extraordinary drama doesn’t just play games with sexual disorientation and philosophical argument; it’s also implicitly about life turned upside down for Barny (Riva) and confirmation of faith for Morin (Belmondo). These two represent the deepest moral conflicts of French citizens during WWII’s Occupation when German, Italian and even American invaders test their daily activities and beliefs. After she is relocated to a small Southern town, displaced Parisian atheist Barny succumbs to intellectual decadence. “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” she taunts Morin during confession. From there, Melville mounts a singular test of fashionable Communist rhetoric. If it isn’t defeated by Morin’s hermeneutics then it is trounced by Morin and Barny’s natural, unstoppable human attraction. Piety gives way to tumescence, then awe.
Overall, Leon Morin, isn’t really much like Bresson. For one thing, Melville doesn’t have Bresson’s aesthetic rigor; his whimsical temperament (known to have inspired the French New Wave) makes a promiscuous display of narrative devices (dissolves, blackouts, stark portraiture, moody settings and documentary inserts). He also lacks Godard’s almost physical intellectual rigor. But when Belmondo and Riva’s sensual exchanges underscore their academic badinage, Leon Morin, Priest becomes almost sui generis in the way it transgresses intellectual, art-house pretenses. It doesn’t deny the kind of spirituality today’s critics desperately avoid in Steve McQueen’s Hunger—even though that film was produced by Mel Gibson’s production company.
Haughty Barny’s discourse with the proletarian pastor Morin shakes up her class snobbery as powerfully as it disrupts her romantic preconceptions—which includes same-sex attraction to an office worker. This, actually, is Ingmar Bergman territory but with a clearer sociological focus. It also anticipates the occupation stories told in Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980) and especially André Téchiné’s more sexually explicit Strayed (2002).
Given today’s secularist cultural climate, it will be interesting to see if Leon Morin, Priest rivals the box-office success of Melville’s dreary Army of Shadows. This WWII story is vastly superior and scintillating. Belmondo makes the comeliest cleric since Montgomery Clift in Hitchcock’s I Confess, yet it’s a performance of compelling restraint. Morin’s conversion of the town’s languishing females is not mere blasphemous farce but an astonishing parade of human nature—Left Bank style. (Riva’s moral and emotional conflicts recall the shocking scene where Ingrid Bergman tempts a priest in Rossellini’s Stromboli.)
An argument could be made for Leon Morin, Priest as Melville’s finest film. He transcends chic genre convention and his normal kitsch. Morin’s argument for “the invisible church: all human beings of good will” is practically a testament to what cinema art should cultivate. When Morin directs Barny to read devout literature, he points out the presbytery “near the Cinema Moderne.”
Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville
April 17-23 at Film Forum
Runtime: 115 min.
It’s as if someone said, “Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest isn’t juicy enough. Put big actors in it. Get that sexy Belmondo guy from Breathless and Emmanuelle Riva, the hot chick from Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and have the two of them talk religion, slyly flirting and exploring the limits of sacred and profane love.” Thus Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1961 Leon Morin, Priest (now showing in revival at Film Forum) came to be.
This extraordinary drama doesn’t just play games with sexual disorientation and philosophical argument; it’s also implicitly about life turned upside down for Barny (Riva) and confirmation of faith for Morin (Belmondo). These two represent the deepest moral conflicts of French citizens during WWII’s Occupation when German, Italian and even American invaders test their daily activities and beliefs. After she is relocated to a small Southern town, displaced Parisian atheist Barny succumbs to intellectual decadence. “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” she taunts Morin during confession. From there, Melville mounts a singular test of fashionable Communist rhetoric. If it isn’t defeated by Morin’s hermeneutics then it is trounced by Morin and Barny’s natural, unstoppable human attraction. Piety gives way to tumescence, then awe.
Overall, Leon Morin, isn’t really much like Bresson. For one thing, Melville doesn’t have Bresson’s aesthetic rigor; his whimsical temperament (known to have inspired the French New Wave) makes a promiscuous display of narrative devices (dissolves, blackouts, stark portraiture, moody settings and documentary inserts). He also lacks Godard’s almost physical intellectual rigor. But when Belmondo and Riva’s sensual exchanges underscore their academic badinage, Leon Morin, Priest becomes almost sui generis in the way it transgresses intellectual, art-house pretenses. It doesn’t deny the kind of spirituality today’s critics desperately avoid in Steve McQueen’s Hunger—even though that film was produced by Mel Gibson’s production company.
Haughty Barny’s discourse with the proletarian pastor Morin shakes up her class snobbery as powerfully as it disrupts her romantic preconceptions—which includes same-sex attraction to an office worker. This, actually, is Ingmar Bergman territory but with a clearer sociological focus. It also anticipates the occupation stories told in Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980) and especially André Téchiné’s more sexually explicit Strayed (2002).
Given today’s secularist cultural climate, it will be interesting to see if Leon Morin, Priest rivals the box-office success of Melville’s dreary Army of Shadows. This WWII story is vastly superior and scintillating. Belmondo makes the comeliest cleric since Montgomery Clift in Hitchcock’s I Confess, yet it’s a performance of compelling restraint. Morin’s conversion of the town’s languishing females is not mere blasphemous farce but an astonishing parade of human nature—Left Bank style. (Riva’s moral and emotional conflicts recall the shocking scene where Ingrid Bergman tempts a priest in Rossellini’s Stromboli.)
An argument could be made for Leon Morin, Priest as Melville’s finest film. He transcends chic genre convention and his normal kitsch. Morin’s argument for “the invisible church: all human beings of good will” is practically a testament to what cinema art should cultivate. When Morin directs Barny to read devout literature, he points out the presbytery “near the Cinema Moderne.”
