LEON MORIN, PRETRE My current obsession is Jean-Paul Belmondo (now 80 and being feted at Cannes this year) as I had realised I had seen so little of his work, though I loved THAT MAN FROM RIO when I saw it aged 18, and finally got to re-see it this year and its just as marvellous as I remembered. My current favourite cult movie! (as per Belmondo label). LEON MORIN PRIEST from 1961 is a more obscure item, directed by Jean-Pierre Melville but more like an austere Bresson film rather than a tale of wartime resistance or gangsters (as in his LE FLIC, LE CIRCLE ROUGE or ARMY OF SHADOWS). This is set in wartime France about a lonely widow and the priest she obsesses about, but it is mainly a static chamber piece where they mainly sit around talking about religion most of the time, so it defies easy categorisation - there is no suspense regarding the resistance [which hardly matters to the story] and the performances are low-key. Emmanuelle Riva is brilliant of course but its an odd role for Belmondo - we never get to really know what his priest feels (is she just a convert to Catholicism for him, or does he have deeper feelings for her?); the ending is oddly inconclusive. Life during wartime is obviously no joke, but it seems very glum here. Probably a difficult film to get into today when religion does not feature in people's lives in the same way. 
No comments:
Post a Comment